Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities [1st ed.] 978-3-030-11634-7;978-3-030-11636-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xx
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Introduction: The Idea of Ecology (David R. Keller)....Pages 3-6
Ecological Thinking in the Western Tradition (David R. Keller)....Pages 7-41
Front Matter ....Pages 43-43
Entities in Patterned Process (David R. Keller)....Pages 45-69
Patterned Process in Biological Evolution (David R. Keller)....Pages 71-88
Reductionism, Holism, and Hierarchy Theory (David R. Keller)....Pages 89-108
Front Matter ....Pages 109-109
Realism or Relativism? (David R. Keller)....Pages 111-131
From Empiricism and Rationalism to Kant and Nietzsche (David R. Keller)....Pages 133-160
Front Matter ....Pages 161-161
Ethics of Ecology (David R. Keller)....Pages 163-181
Political Economy of Ecology (David R. Keller)....Pages 183-210
Beauty, Bioempathy and Ecological Ethics (Kirk Robinson)....Pages 211-224

Citation preview

Studies in Global Justice Series Editor: Deen K. Chatterjee

David R. Keller

Ecology and Justice— Citizenship in Biotic Communities

Studies in Global Justice Volume 19

Series Editor Deen K. Chatterjee, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Editorial Board Elizabeth Ashford, Department of Philosophy, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK Gillian Brock, Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, Auckland New Zealand Thom Brooks, Durham Law School, Durham University, Durham, UK Simon Caney, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Hiram E. Chodosh, President, Claremont McKenna College, Claremount, CA, USA Jean-Marc Coicaud, Law School, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA Michael Doyle, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Andreas Follesdal, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Carol Gould, Hunter College, New York, NY, USA Virginia Held, Department of Philosophy, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA Alison Jaggar, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA Richard W. Miller, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Sanjay G. Reddy, The New School For Social Research, New York, NY, USA David Rodin, University of Oxford, UK Joel H. Rosenthal, President, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, New York, NY, USA Kok-Chor Tan, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Leif Wenar, King’s College London, UK Veronique Zanetti, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

In today’s world, national borders seem irrelevant when it comes to international crime and terrorism. Likewise, human rights, migration, climate change, poverty, inequality, democracy, development, trade, bioethics, hunger, war and peace are all issues of global rather than national justice. The fact that mass demonstrations are organized whenever the world’s governments and politicians gather to discuss such major international issues is testimony to a widespread appeal for justice around the world. Discussions of global justice are not limited to the fields of political philosophy and political theory. In fact, research concerning global justice quite often requires an interdisciplinary approach. It involves aspects of ethics, law, human rights, international relations, sociology, economics, public health, and ecology. Studies in Global Justice takes up that interdisciplinary perspective. The series brings together outstanding monographs and anthologies that deal with both basic normative theorizing and its institutional applications. The volumes in the series discuss such aspects of global justice as the scope of social justice, the moral significance of borders, global inequality and poverty, the justification and content of human rights, the aims and methods of development, global environmental justice, global bioethics, the global institutional order and the justice of intervention and war. Volumes in this series will prove of great relevance to researchers, educators and students, as well as politicians, policymakers and government officials.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6958

David R. Keller

Ecology and Justice— Citizenship in Biotic Communities

123

David R. Keller (Deceased) Salt Lake City, UT, USA

ISSN 1871-0409 ISSN 1871-1456 (electronic) Studies in Global Justice ISBN 978-3-030-11634-7 ISBN 978-3-030-11636-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930358 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Frank B. Golley (1930–2006), who never met an ecosystem he didn’t like…

Foreword

Springer’s acclaimed series, Studies in Global Justice, has been setting the tone and direction of the increasingly important area of scholarship on the moral consequences of global interdependence. This interdependence is nowhere more pronounced than in human interactions with natural systems. Ecological issues not only defy national boundaries, they also challenge us in assessing our roles and duties as citizens in biotic communities. David Keller’s book, Ecology and Justice: Citizenship in Biotic Communities, provides an outline of a basic philosophy of ecology that addresses these concerns. Using the standard categories of academic philosophy, Keller asks the big questions that go beyond the disciplinary boundaries in tracking the advances and changes in the philosophy of ecology over time. Keller’s book is an introductory text in an outline format. This makes it different from the rest of the publications in the Series that are geared toward high-end research for advanced students and scholars. We made an exception this time based on our belief that some of our publications should be accessible to students at introductory levels as well. However, although the format of the book is introductory, the ideas in it have far-reaching implications. Given today’s complex conservation and environmental issues, the argument for ecological citizenship carries an important message for a global community where national borders seem increasingly irrelevant. We should also note that in its treatment of the history of ecology, philosophy of ecology, and ecological justice, Keller’s book is exclusively focused on Western canonical philosophy in the Hellenistic thought and European scientific tradition. This restricted focus is acknowledged by the author himself in the book. Indigenous peoples in the West as well as the traditions in the East and the Global South have a long and rich legacy of ecological philosophies that are especially relevant in today’s world. In future publications, we plan to cover these perspectives for a comprehensive worldview on this important theme. Unfortunately, David Keller did not live long enough to give his manuscript the further development and finishing touches it deserved. Nevertheless, his core thesis is crucial for an ecologically informed ethics. The final chapter of this book seeks to complement and advance the direction Keller pursued in the manuscript. It is taken vii

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from an essay by Kirk Robinson, a philosopher, naturalist, and a friend of David Keller. We thank Robinson for the chapter and we especially thank him for the extensive editing he did to bring the manuscript to publication. Salt Lake City, USA

Deen Chatterjee Series Editor: Studies in Global Justice

Preface

This book is the product of the classroom, the library, and the trail. It is born of thinking and talking about the philosophical implications of ecology—especially the enigmatic place of humans in nature. It flows directly from teaching a wide range of college courses, represents thousands of hours of solitary study, and tracks granite peaks of the Wasatch Mountains and the red rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau in Utah. Its origins extend to my experiences doing doctorate work at the University of Georgia in the early 1990s. I was lucky enough to participate in the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, and I got to know such matchless philosophers and humans as John Granrose, Frederick Ferré, Victoria Davion, Clark Wolf, and ecologists Frank Golley, Eugene Odum, E. Charles Brummer, Peter Hartel, and many others. Most influentially, walking and talking with Golley in the Piedmont of north Georgia and the desert of Zion National Park convinced me that there are few more noble human pursuits than trying to understand the ecological communities within which one lives. One must become a better, more just, more moral, more harmonious, biotic citizen. These experiences resulted in an anthology that I co-edited with Golley, The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis (University of Georgia Press, 2000). Golley and I intended to co-author a related monograph, but his death in 2006 doomed that project. The present work pays homage to Golley and his Georgia roots. As I learned in Athens, the science of ecology is rife with philosophical questions, and these questions without exception lead to ethics: an understanding of biotic communities enjoins a normativity of biotic communities. This area of inquiry might be referred to broadly as “the philosophy of ecology” or “the philosophical study of ecology” and cuts across the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities (Rolston 1975; Egerton 1977; Worster 1977; Saarinen 1982; Kingsland 1985; McIntosh 1985; Norton 1987; Brennan 1988; Callicott 1989, 101–14; Hagen 1989; Botkin 1990; Golley 1993; Hull 1993; Shrader-Frechette 1995; Keller and Golley 2000). During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the most significant contributions to the philosophy of ecology were made by scholars thinking and writing in the analytic style who clarified basic terms and explained the meaning of ix

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scientific propositions. Pickett et al. (1994, 2007) addressed practical problems in theoretical modeling. Laplante (2004) defended an inclusive definition of ecological science; Mikkelson (2001) and Odenbaugh (2005) delineated realist and rationalist epistemologies for ecology; Sarkar (2005) outlined an axiology of biodiversity. Yet the surface has only been scratched. Even the best works on the orientation of ecological science within the Western intellectual tradition (Worster 1977; Tobey 1981; Kingsland 1985, 1991; McIntosh 1985; Golley 1993) are in want of precision, particularly with regard to standard academic philosophy. Texts that come closest to situating the philosophical implications of ecological thinking in the history of ideas (Lovejoy 1936, Glacken 1967, Passmore 1974) were published in the past century. Metaphysics, axiology, and epistemology have received inadequate treatment (Laplante 2004, 277). Topics outside the normal purview of philosophy of biology remain ignored: the under-understood historical antecedents of ecological science, the social construction of nature, the role of aesthetics in ecological understanding, the overt tension in ecology between rationalism and empiricism, the separation of ethics and ecology, and the crisis of environmental public policy. Due to the radical and robust interdisciplinarity of the subject matter, the philosophical study of ecology requires a history of ideas approach. To mitigate this shortfall, I intend to create an outline of the basic philosophical issues endemic to the science of ecology. My method is an analysis of the basic problems of the science of ecology using the standard categories of academic philosophy: metaphysics, axiology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. For this study, the analysis has been done only through the historical contextualization of ecological thinking within the scope of the Western (Occidental) intellectual tradition. My writing flows directly from my teaching. Schooled in the tradition of the Liberal Arts, Letters, and Sciences, I teach in a historical, interdisciplinary, Socratic, literature-based style. This book bears the fruits of 17 years instructing Environmental Ethics, Environmental Studies, Philosophy of Ecology, Philosophy of Science, and History of the Western Intellectual Tradition courses at Utah Valley University.

Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes to my best friend, soulmate, interlocutor, travel companion, and wife, Anina Merrill. Deen Chatterjee, Series Editor of the Springer Studies in Global Justice, had the vision and drive to see the project through to completion. Gratitude to Richard H. Keller for the unflagging and unwavering support only a proud father can provide. Thanks to Chuck Crumly, former science editor of the University of California Press, for his commitment to the project in the protean stage. Also, thanks to Jurek Kolasa and other anonymous peer-reviewers for constructive criticism. Appreciation to Kristin Shrader-Frechette for convincing me to finally cede “Philosophy of Ecology” to the analytic philosophers of science.

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I enjoyed biweekly Monday morning meetings for a time at the now-defunct Nobrow Coffee in Salt Lake City with L. Jackson Newell, as we provided mutual support for one another’s book projects. My thanks to Bill Nelson for his superb graphic art. Ross Green, Research Librarian at Utah Valley University, proved indispensable. Korkut Alp Erturk tutored me in political economy. Figure 2.3 is reprinted with permission of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, Maryland. Portions of the text draw from research previously published, most recent to oldest, as: “An Introduction to Ethics for Teaching,” Teaching Ethics Vol. 11 No. 1 (Fall 2010), pp. 1–52; editorial material, David R. Keller (ed.), Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2010); “Toward a Post-Mechanistic Philosophy of Nature,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Vol. 16 No. 4 (Autumn 2009), pp. 709–25; “Deep Ecology,” in J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman (eds.), Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 1 (Farmington Hills, Michigan: Macmillan Reference USA), pp. 206–11; “Earth First!,” ibid., pp. 221–23; “Land Ethics,” in Ivan I. Mazour, Alexander N. Chumakov, and William C. Gay (eds.), International Global Studies Encyclopedia (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005), pp. 326–28; “Western Environmentalism,” ibid., pp. 540–43; “Values in Nature: The Contribution of Frederick Ferré to Environmental Philosophy,” in George Allan and Merle F. Allshouse (eds.), Nature, Truth, and Value: Exploring the Thinking of Frederick Ferré (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 177–98; “Towards an Environmental Political Economy,” Essays in Philosophy Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2005); “Putting Food Production in Context: Toward a Postmechanistic Agricultural Ethic” (with E. Charles Brummer), BioScience Vol. 52 (March 2002): 264–71; and editorial material (with Frank B. Golley), from David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley (eds.), The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Rockville, UT, USA Summer Solstice June 2013

David R. Keller

Contents

Part I

The History of Ecology

1

Introduction: The Idea of Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2

Ecological Thinking in the Western Tradition . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Protoecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Ontological Pregnancy of Biotic Communities . 2.1.2 Natural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 Arcadianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Modern Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Normative Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Scientific Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Conclusion: Five Features of the Idea of Ecology . . . . 2.3.1 Naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Ontological Interconnectedness . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.3 Holism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Nonanthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.5 Ecological Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part II 3

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The Metaphysics of Ecology

Entities in Patterned Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 The Mechanical View of Nature 3.1.2 The Organism as Machine . . . . 3.2 Organicism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Continuities in Nature . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Discontinuities in Nature . . . . .

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3.2.3 Beauty in Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Teleonomy and Teleomaty . . . . . 3.3 Ecological Entities and Process . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Ecological Entities . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Ecological Process . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Four Ontologies of the Ecological Entity 3.4.1 The Superorganism . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 The Coincidental Assemblage . . . 3.4.3 The Ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.4 The Stochastic Community . . . . . 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

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Patterned Process in Biological Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 One Long Argument: The Theory of Descent with Modifications Through Natural Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Evolution of Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Adaptation Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Ecosystem Ecology, Evolutionary Ecology, and Integrative Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Ecosystem Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 Evolutionary Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.3 Integrative Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Reductionism, Holism, and Hierarchy Theory . . . . . . . . 5.1 Reductionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Holism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Hierarchy Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Koestler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Nested, Nonnested, and Unified Hierarchies . 5.3.3 Applied Hierarchy Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part III 6

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The Epistemology of Ecology

Realism or Relativism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Cartesian Realism: The Supernatural Subject 6.2 Cultural Relativism: The Social Construction of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Wissenssoziologie . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6.2.2 Foucauldianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Kuhnianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Sociology of Ecological Wisdom . . . . . . 6.3.1 The Social Construction of Nature . . . 6.3.2 Scientific Ecology as Social Institution 6.4 Phenomenology of Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

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From Empiricism and Rationalism to Kant and Nietzsche 7.1 Empiricism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.1 Inductive Empiricism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2 Hume’s Critique of Inductive Empiricism . . . 7.2 Rationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Population Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Biogeography Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.3 Systems Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Kantianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Immanuel Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 Karl Popper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Nietzschean Perspectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ethics of Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Environmental Metaethics: Bridging the Is/Ought Gap 8.1.1 The Is/Ought Diremptionists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1.2 Aldo Leopold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1.3 J. Baird Callicott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Environmental Normative Ethics: Reading the Land . . 8.2.1 Aristotelian Virtue Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 Environmental Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Three Models for Ecological Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.1 Ecocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.2 Nonanthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.3 Nonegalitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part IV 8

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The Normativity of Ecology

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Contents

Political Economy of Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Industrial Political Economy: The Expansionary Model . . 9.1.1 The Growth Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.2 The Abrahamic View of Nature (Resourcism) . . . 9.2 Industrial Political Economy: The Stationary-State Model 9.2.1 John Stuart Mill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.2 Herman Daly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Ecological Industrial Political Economy: Invisible Hand with a Green Thumb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.1 Laissez-Faire Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.2 Regulation of Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.3 No-Diseconomy Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10 Beauty, Bioempathy and Ecological Ethics . . . . . . Kirk Robinson 10.1 The Owl of Athena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 A Fierce Green Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 Aesthetic Blindness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 Facts and Values: The Common View . . . . . 10.5 Facts and Values: A Competing View . . . . . 10.6 Chicken or Egg? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.7 Varieties of Intrinsic Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.8 The Multiplicity of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.9 Dispelling Skepticism About Intrinsic Value . 10.10 Beauty, Bioempathy and Ecological Ethics . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Author

David R. Keller is deceased. He was Professor of Philosophy, University Professor of Environmental Studies, and Director Emeritus of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

Rhizomatous anatomy of the idea of ecology. The rhizome consists of root-stems (structure in nature, empirical inquiry, and environmental conscience) and two copses (Protoecology and Modern Ecology) of five ramets (Continuity and Plenitude in Nature, Natural History, Arcadianism, Scientific Ecology, and Normative Ecology) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A natural theologian (Cheselden 1733) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Resource axiology of nature (Agricola (1912, 103)) . . . . . . . . German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the word ‘Ecology’ (Nicola Perscheid) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English botanist Arthur Tansley by Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn (1940) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The biotic pyramid (Leopold 1939) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Malthus’ population principle (Keller and Golley 2000, 236; Keller 2010a, b, 416) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ceiling of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge (Gould and Lewontin 1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spandrels formed by intersecting arches (Gould and Lewontin 1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exponential (A1) and logistic (B1) models of animal population. Two possible time derivations of exponential (A2 and A3) and logistic (B2 and B3) models (Nicholson 1954b, 34; Odum 1971, 184) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logarithmic parabola of United States population from 1790 to 1910 (Pearl and Reed 1920, 279) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Predictive logistic population curve (Pearl 1925, 65) . . . . . . . Three predictive world population growth models (United Nations 2004, 84) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Predator-prey relations of protista (Gause 1964, 127) . . . . . . .

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Cyclic oscillations of predator-prey mammal populations as indicated by Pelts (Odum 1971, 191) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of an island (MacArthur and Wilson 1963, 376; 1967, 21) . . Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of large (EL) and small islands (ES) (MacArthur 1972, 102) . Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of near (EN) and far (EF) islands (MacArthur 1972, 101) . . . . Systems modeling. The structure and function of an ecosystem is analyzable into linked processes of sub-systems (Odum 1971, 277) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hypothetico-deductive method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leopold’s land pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tornado economics (Keller 2005a, b) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diseconomy of steel production to human health in Utah Valley, Utah (Keller 2005a, b) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I

The History of Ecology

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Idea of Ecology

Abstract The idea of ecology rests on three fundamental assumptions: that (1) living nature has some sort of structure explained by rules or laws; (2) these laws are discoverable through empirical observation; and (3) humans are morally culpable for harm they do to nonhuman nature, and thereby also to other humans. Each fundamental principle has roots in ancient Greek philosophy. Over time they have produced several distinct disciplinary forms that collectively constitute the idea of ecology. The central thesis of this book is that ecology has implications for environmental ethics. The argument posits Scientific Ecology as a reliable source of descriptions of biotic communities for prescriptions regarding human treatment of biotic communities. The exegesis begins with the contextualization of the idea of ecology in the Western intellectual tradition, which provides the framework for an analysis of the basic philosophical issues of the science of ecology, including ethical implications. Scientific ecology and ecological justice are intimately connected: the way that the world is has much to do with the way that the world should be.

The idea of ecology is a signal achievement of the Western intellectual tradition.1 The West furnished fertile soil for its growth, and the idea bears the traits of its origin and genealogy. The first impulse is to represent the anatomy of the idea of ecology as a majestic tree, fundamental assumptions as roots drawing nourishment from the soil of Western thought, converging into a unitary, solid trunk, branching into different disciplines. But this metaphor has a problem of centralization: the five disciplinary forms are not reducible to a common essence or denominator. Arcadianism and Normative Ecology, for example, involve a strong sense of environmental conscience 1 The

Western (Occidental) tradition has its origins in Greek and Hebrew antiquity and is the foundation of European culture. The Western tradition is contrasted with the Eastern (Oriental) tradition, which originated in ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations and is the foundation of Asian culture. The Western tradition derives its name from the fact that the Grecian and Italian peninsulas are west of early civilizations with written histories, such as Sumeria, centered on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia. This geographical distinction contrasts the Occident with civilizations to the east, in Asia. This dichotomy between East and West is itself a product of Western thinking. It excludes the rest of the world and consequently the abundantly interesting cultures of Aboriginal Australia, Africa, Arabia, Native (South, Central, North) America, and Oceania. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 D. R. Keller, Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities, Studies in Global Justice 19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_1

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whereas Scientific Ecology in most instances does not. The idea of ecology has no “trunk.” The idea of ecology is more like a network of roots and shoots growing horizontally and vertically, roots giving sustenance to clusters of sprouts shooting above the surface. The idea of ecology is more like a rhizome.2 ‘Rhizome’ is a botanical term derived from the ancient Greek word meaning “mass of roots” (Liddell and Scott 1968, 1571). A rhizome is a plant organ that produces a horizontal root-stem network and vertical stalks, or ramets. Groups of ramets form copses. A rhizome propagates by sending out root-stems through (aspen) or above (strawberry) the soil (Stern 2000, 96). In addition to aspen and strawberry, other examples of rhizomes are bamboo, ginger, and hops. In some rhizomes rootstems split and recombine in nodes to form new root-stems (Beddie 1942, 199, 202). Rhizomes are clones: they propagate asexually, so any point in the root-stem system can be a new point of propagation. Rhizomes break and create two individual plants. Feeder roots draw nutrients from the soil and ramets photosynthesize food, all connected by the root-stem network. Rhizomatous structure allows sustenance to be shared among various parts of the plant. Picture the idea of ecology as a colony of Rocky Mountain quaking aspen.3 The primary root-stems are the three fundamental assumptions (structure in nature, empirical inquiry, and environmental conscience) growing horizontally through the soil of the Western tradition (Fig. 1.1). The first primary root-stem (structure in nature) is the proposition that the biosphere—the habitable portion of the Earth, our “home”—has some kind of structure or design (McIntosh 1985, 12). Two mutually exclusive possibilities are that the structure is static and teleological or that it is stochastic and teleonomic (see Sects. 2.1, 3.4 and 7.3). In either instance, there remains the belief that there is some kind of structure in nature that is, to some extent, rationally intelligible. The identity of an organism is its role or function in this structure, and this function may be discerned through empirical inquiry (the second primary root-stem). Direct experience—travel and observation—is crucial to understanding the biosphere (Humboldt 1997; Darwin 2001). The third primary root-stem (environmental conscience) is the proposition that there is a reciprocity between human activity on the environment and environmental impact on the human condition, and that humans are morally accountable—both to nonhuman nature and to other humans—for these impacts. The theme of the morality of human modification of nature has been taken up by most of the greatest thinkers of the Western tradition (Glacken 1967, 713). Therefore, the idea of ecology is like a rhizomatous plant. It consists of disciplinary instantiations (ramets) separated by history (copses). All are connected, in different configurations, to the three fundamental assumptions (primary root-stems). The root-stem network produces ramets growing vertically from the soil. In this 2 On

theoretical constructions as rhizomes see Deleuze and Guattari (1987), 21. metaphor is inspired by a rhizomatous plant in Central Utah—a clone colony of Populus tremuloides named Pando, possibly the world’s largest organism (Grant 1993; DeWoody et al. 2008).

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5 1, interspecific competition is most significant (Gotelli 2001, 102). Moreover, the equations take into consideration the asymmetry of other factors in the struggle for existence, such as different carrying capacities of different species in the same ecological system (K1 versus K2 ) and different rates of increase of different species (r1 versus r2 ) (ibid.). Behind the mathematics, the a priori prediction is that populations of predators and prey cycle regularly and rhythmically, as a function of the ecological relationships between the two. Change in prey and predator may be positive or negative for each species involved. The textbook example of such regular cycling is Canadian snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) and lynx (Lynx canadensis) populations gleaned from records of the Hudson Bay Company from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (MacLulich 1937; Odum 1971, 191). The concomitance of the fluctuating cycles of predator and prey populations is striking (Fig. 7.7). Pearl’s single-species and Lotka-Volterra’s dual-species logistic functions treat time and population as variables and location as a constant. Gause’s two-species logistic functions are more ecologically sophisticated. Gause added location as a

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variable in coefficients [ALPHA] and [BETA]: the prey might take cover and avoid capture ([ALPHA]), or migration and immigration of predator and prey species from metacommunities might intensify or lessen predation. Gause demonstrated the applicability of mathematics in the understanding of predator-prey dynamics in ecological communities. In summary, population mathematics is a very useful tool for simplifying complex phenomena of the structure and function of ecological communities. Whether the future will in fact reflect the past remains the open problem of induction (Sect. 7.1). Even Gause’s refined equations might not hold up in as-yet unobserved cases.

7.2.2 Biogeography Theory The connection between species diversity distribution and island geography had been noted before MacArthur and Wilson (1963, 1967), but they built the mathematical model. Importantly, while early studies involved actual islands of land surrounded by water, terrestrial habitats might also be islands for a particular species. For example, the American pika, Ochotona princeps, lives in the alpine zones of island mountain peaks. In the 1950s, American zoogeographer Darlington (1957, 483) observed: (1) there is generally speaking a 5:1 ratio between island area and species diversity—that is, a ten-fold increase in land size corresponds to doubling of species; (2) immigration patterns from a mainland to outlying islands are orderly, with species representation diminishing with distance (idem, 485); and (3) higher dispersal rates result in a greater representation of immigrant species and lower rates result in a greater representation of endemic species (idem, 486–87). Yet, in the words of Mayr (1976, 616), patterns noticed by zoologists were long ignored until they were “transformed into graphs and mathematical formulae” by MacArthur and Wilson. The core principle of island biogeography is that the species diversity of an island is a function of immigration and extinction. Immigration and extinction are functions of the size of an island and the distance of an island from the external immigration source (the mainland or nearby islands). The equilibrium of the number of species of an island depends upon the rate of immigration and the rate of extinction. If I is defined as the rate of immigration, P is defined as the size of the “species pool” of immigrants, and E as the rate of extinction, then S is equilibrium point of species diversity of the island: S

IP I+E

In its most simple form, MacArthur and Wilson represent this equation as two curves, one of decreasing immigration rate and the other of increasing extinction rate (Fig. 7.8). The downward slope of the immigration curve indicates that as the number of a species present on the island increases, then fewer immigrants will be

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Fig. 7.8 Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of an island (MacArthur and Wilson 1963, 376; 1967, 21)

new species, reaching zero when the island hosts all mainland species. The upward slope of the extinction curve indicates that as the number of species present on the island increases, then more species will become extinct through competition. The intersection of the two curves represents the species diversity equilibrium point of the island. The principles of island biogeography can be applied to the analysis of islands of different sizes and varying distance from the mainland. Larger islands have higher immigration rates than smaller islands because they are bigger targets, and have lower extinction rates because of higher immigration rates. Thus, a small island is at species diversity equilibrium with fewer species (ES ) than a larger island (EL ), because the smaller island will have a higher extinction rate (Fig. 7.9). Similarly, proximate islands have higher immigration rates than remote islands, and therefore a near island is at species diversity equilibrium (EN ) with a higher number of species than a far island (EF ) (Fig. 7.10). The mathematical elegance of the work of MacArthur and Wilson has inspired the development of more sophisticated models. Contemporary American ecologist Stephen Hubbell starts with the theory of island biogeography and elaborates a model of community structure named The Stochastic Community (vide Sect. 3.4). The stochastic community is a “neutral” model in which individuals have the same biological fitness, birth, death, and dispersal characteristics: “all individuals of every species obey exactly the same rules of ecological engagement” (2001, 6–7). As per the principles of continuity and plentitude (Sect. 2.1), all niches are occupied. In order for a new individual to enter the community, another individual must die. The replacement of that individual is not based on competitive advantage but by

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Fig. 7.9 Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of large (EL ) and small islands (ES ) (MacArthur 1972, 102)

Fig. 7.10 Biogeographic equilibrium model of species diversity of near (EN ) and far (EF ) islands (MacArthur 1972, 101)

dispersal probabilities governed by chance. Dispersal-assembly connects an ecological community with a metacommunity through migration (e.g., relatively isolated mountain island populations of pikas might form a metapopulation of pikas spread over a mountain range). Hubbell explains speciation and diversity patterns, competition, predation, and parasitism, metapopulations (idem, 202–30), and the punctuated equilibrium of the fossil record (idem, 236) with a single mathematical theory. The theory of island biogeography has tremendous explanatory utility, for it allows the ecological factors of species diversity, extinction, immigration, and proximity to adjacent ecological communities to be analyzed together in one inclusive model. As mentioned, it can also be applied to a variety of ecological communities. For example, apart from the obvious example of land surrounded by water, islands may be terrestrial ecological systems circumscribed by a limiting terrestrial environment. To cite a specific example, the Deep Creek Range in western Utah rises to twelve

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thousand feet and receives approximately four hundred inches of snow per year but is completely surrounded by desert. In this sense, the range is an ecological island in a sea of desert. The meta-population of pikas occupying the Deep Creek range is effectively isolated from the metapopulation occupying the Snake Range less than 30 miles to the south.

7.2.3 Systems Modeling Another approach to rationalist ecology is Systems Modeling. Whereas theoretical population ecologists apply mathematical modeling to the population dynamics of communities, systems ecologists apply mathematical modeling to the energy dynamics of communities. Theoretical systems modeling maps the flow of energy and materials through ecological communities. An ecological system is treated as a complex system of sub-systems. Each sub-system has inputs and outputs. A sub-system may be treated as a “black box” in which the inputs and outputs are quantified but the intricacies that transform those inputs into outputs are left undetermined for future analysis. Using this methodology, an ecological community, treated as a system, is describable schematically as a flow chart (Fig. 7.11). An ecological system is capable of being represented mathematically by symbolizing energy sources, primary producers, heat sinks, consumers, storage, decomposers (Odum 1960). Odum (1957) describes a freshwater aquatic community in central Florida in terms of systems modeling. Systems modeling is especially amenable to

Fig. 7.11 Systems modeling. The structure and function of an ecosystem is analyzable into linked processes of sub-systems (Odum 1971, 277)

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digital codification. Increasingly powerful computers and software have encouraged the development of systems modeling. These three methodologies leave little doubt that rationalism has secured a permanent role in ecological science: “a background in mathematics is a requirement for the serious ecologist. Without a working knowledge of certain mathematical concepts the current ecological literature is virtually meaningless” (Vandermeer 1981, 1). One expert on artic sea ice studies the polar region through mathematical modeling but has never actually been there (Revkin 2005a, b).2 Important as it is, rationalist methodology is inadequate as a complete epistemology for ecology. For one thing, the ontological connection between mathematics and the objective structure and function of ecological communities is always ambiguous. Some ecologists deny any connection between mathematics and ecological phenomena outright (Levandowsky 1977). Others see the need for unifying theory and recognize the relevance of mathematics for ecology but remain dubious that the bulk of mathematical models have much to do with the actual structure and function of ecological systems (Slobodkin 1975). As ecologist Stuart Pimm puts it, “if you look at random data long enough, all kinds of patterns can be imagined” (1991, 388). The point can be illustrated by a sequence of numbers—for example: 2749. What rule does this sequence instantiate? In other words, what would be the correct continuation of the sequence? 6 comes easily to mind, but in fact the sequence does not imply a unique series. The sequence might be continued with a 5—or any other number between 0 and 9 (Wittgenstein, 185). There are practical problems with rationalist methodology as well. Unmitigated rationalism could swamp the ecologists’ ability to do ecology: theory construction has the danger of out-pacing empirical verification. Simberloff (1981, 52) charges that mathematical ecologists multiply models without bothering to do much empirical testing: “ecology is awash with…untested (and often untestable) models, most claiming to be heuristic, many simply elaborations of earlier untested models. Entire journals are devoted to such work and are as remote from biological reality as are faithhealers.” [Elton complained of Lotka: “Like most mathematicians, he takes the hopeful biologist to the edge of the pond, points out that a good swim will help his work, and then pushes him in and leaves him to drown” (1935, 149)]. This is the basis of Canadian biologist Robert Peters (1991) sustained empiricist critique of rationalist ecology. Sciences are strong or weak, Peters argues, depending on the coherence of stated goals and the testability of predictions. In weak sciences, “goals and criteria are poorly enunciated, less accepted, and more sporadically applied. These sciences are less coherent, they contain many constructs of dubious merit, and their growth is lethargic” (op. cit., 1). Peters charges that rationalist approaches to ecology, such as mathematical modeling and the theoretical search for a single, unifying paradigm, which have largely dominated twentieth-century 2 “I’d

like to see what it’s like before it actually disappears,” said Marika Holland, a respected modeler of sea-ice melting at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 2005 (Revkin 2005a, b). Holland has carried on her research a priori, never having visited the Arctic.

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ecology, have devolved to the point where ecology has ceased to be science at all (Woodell 1992, 374). “Many leading ecological thinkers,” Peters charges, “seem more fascinated by unanswerable questions than testable hypotheses” (1991, 14). Peters notes that many introductory textbooks “refer to entities which we cannot identify unambiguously [.] Still other questions encourage infinite research programs or scholastic debates, because no specifiable observation would constitute an answer. As a result, ecologists can continue to ask the same questions, to elaborate the same answers, to refine their approaches, to collect data and to express their opinions without any danger of finishing their research” (idem, 13). The solution is to get back to the empiricist roots of ecology, to the things themselves, to testing hypotheses and remaining faithful to the observational data (idem, 14). Rationalist methodology assumes that the nature of ecological communities can be idealized and universalized independently of the individual peculiarities of the objects of study. This assumption is false. Ecological research is as much about the evolutionary peculiarities of biological systems as about generalities (Sect. 4.5). Mathematics must not become a Procrustean bed into which ecological entities are forced. The epistemology of ecology requires, therefore, methods of inquiry that include elements of both empiricism and rationalism. This points to Kant.

7.3 Kantianism The foregoing review informs us that empiricism and rationalism are both necessary conditions for an epistemology of ecology, but neither is sufficient. The Kantian method of Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) provides a workable epistemology of ecology.

7.3.1 Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) assessed the schools of Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism and concluded that one epistemology does not have primacy over the other. Whereas philosophers before Kant gave importance to abstract knowledge over empirical knowledge, or conversely, Kant asserted that both are necessary. All knowledge begins with experience “yet it does not on that account all arise from experience” (2006a, 136). The content of human knowledge is the sensa of experience (which is a posteriori), but the very “possibility of experience itself” (idem, 138) is grounded in the structure of human cognition (which is a priori). The human mind organizes the raw data of experience according to set categories. Those categories include space, time and causation. They are a priori in the sense that they are necessary preconditions of experience—experience necessarily conforms to them—but the empirical knowledge we acquire is based on sensory experience, which is a posteriori. This synthesis of rationalism and empiricism is

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commonly referred to as Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” an allusion to Kant’s own reference to Copernicus (idem, 113). Ptolemaic astronomers had asserted that celestial bodies revolve around the earth; whereas, Copernicus showed that they (including the earth) revolve around the sun. Similarly, empiricist philosophers had claimed that all empirical knowledge is derived from experience and can be explained in terms of experience; whereas, Kant argued that although empirical knowledge arises from experience, it cannot be explained in terms of experience only.

7.3.2 Karl Popper Karl Popper adopted and extended Kant’s epistemology into a methodology of science. Popper’s emphasis on the importance of subjectivity in directing observation and organizing knowledge marks the influence of Kant. Popper rejected “naïve empiricism” that strives to amass as much data as possible. He refers to naïve empiricism as the “bucket theory” of knowledge (Popper 1977). For Popper, there is no such thing as pure, passive, “objective” observation. Rather, the scientist’s attention and expectations are products of his or her “total ideology”—corresponding to Foucault’s grid of intelligibility and Kuhn’s paradigm (Sect. 6.2). The effective scientist is thus able to efficiently select and organize data in order to discover something new. Popper referred to a sophisticated Kantian epistemology as the “searchlight theory” of knowledge. Diverging from Logical Positivism, Popper asserted that falsifiability—not verifiability—is the proper criterion for identifying the scientific value of a hypothesis or theory. The standard of falsifiability is given by the empirical content of a statement. General statements are broader in scope and say more about the world than statements of limited scope. The larger the scope of a statement, the greater the potential for falsifying instances. The statement “All X have Y” is larger in scope and more likely to be falsified by specimens of X that do not have Y, than the statement “Some X have Y.” The statement “the energy loss of moving up one trophic level is ten percent” has more empirical content (and therefore more scientific value) than the narrower hypothesis “the energy loss by moving from the arthropod trophic level to the avian trophic level is ten percent.” The proper method of science, according to Popper, is to generate falsifiable hypotheses. The more potential there is for falsifiability, the better, because the more times the hypothesis is tested and is not falsified, the better confirmed it is. A non-falsifiable hypothesis, by contrast, does not allow for falsification. It protects itself from falsification by explaining away seemingly falsifying observations. For example: “Praying for rain will produce rain unless the barometric pressure is too low.” But how can you tell when the barometric pressure is too low? When you pray for rain and it doesn’t rain. Thus, the hypothesis is non-falsifiable, but it also lacks predictive and explanatory power. Scientific inquiry begins with a hypothesis and proceeds with a prediction based on the hypothesis, which is in turn tested against the observed facts. This is known as the Hypothetico-Deductive Method:

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Fig. 7.12 Hypotheticodeductive method

(1) Hypothesis generation by subjective imagination: E.g. (a) “All X have Y.” (2) Deduction of single empirically testable proposition from hypothesis (a): E.g. (b) “This particular X (viz. P) has Y.”

Consider the hypothesis (i) “All ecosystems require solar radiation to function.” We can derive deductively the singular statement (ii) “This particular ecosystem requires solar radiation to function” (for indefinitely many ecological systems). Does the singular statement have any observable falsifying instances? If it does, then the hypothesis has been falsified and must either be emended or scrapped. If not, then the truth of the hypothesis is confirmed. Confirmation is never total and irrefutable, for there will always be the possibility of falsifying instances, but to the extent that observations conform to it, it is confirmed. If a hypothesis repeatedly resists falsification, it might achieve the provisional status of theory. If a theory withstands attempted falsification long enough, it might even achieve the provisional status of scientific law (Fig. 7.12). The lesson for the philosophy of ecology is evident. Just as a voluminous catalogue of brute facts will lead to little understanding of ecological entities, neither will the

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myopic mapping of mathematical models. Mathematical models are an effective way to direct research and organize data, but data have the final word on the success of the model. In summary, Kantian epistemology mitigates the limitations of empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism alone tends to disorganization and incoherence. Rationalism alone tends to detached theory construction (Werner and Mittelbach 1981, 827). In contrast, Kantianism provides a more adequate epistemology for ecology (Cain 1947; Elger 1947; Mason 1947).

7.4 Nietzschean Perspectivism Scientific inquiry begins with a hypothesis (see Fig. 7.12). The generation of the hypothesis is a creative act. Creative insight depends upon individual idiosyncrasy and uniqueness. German Chemist Friedrich Kekulé (1829–1896), for instance, imagined the molecular structure of benzene as a hexagonal ring while sitting by a hearth, dozing, and dreaming of a snake dancing in the flames of the fire, grabbing its tail and spinning around wildly (Findlay 1965, 39–40).3 Not all hypotheses that might be formulated are equal. Some will have greater antecedent plausibility than others, and these are the ones that creative scientists seek. This is one of Robert Pirsig’s central points in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge” (1974, 108). To avoid drowning in a sea of hypotheses that cannot all be tested, the scientist must single out particularly promising ones using creativity, imagination, intuition, and gut reaction. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explained the creative act of hypothesis generation (1844–1900). Against philosophers like Bacon and Descartes, who believed bracketing subjectivity was possible and desirable, Nietzsche insisted that we are always locked into a particular perspective. A totally objective view is impossible: “As if a world would still remain over after one deducted the perspective!” (Nietzsche 1968a, b, 305). Even the Newtonian absolutes of space and time are relative to a subject (Reichenbach 1951). Werner Heisenberg showed in 1927 how a singular phenomenon like photons may appear to be waves or particles depending on the observer’s choice of instruments (Heisenberg 1983, 62ff). The mapping of a particular perspective must always refer to the particular conditions out of which it arises (Danto 2005, 59). This is the intentionality of the investigator (cf. Sects. 3.3 and 6.4).

3 Sitting

in a winter sauna, Descartes reputedly first glimpsed the outlines of his total epistemic system in dreamy stupor (2006, 25. See also Rodis-Lewis 2005, 30–31).

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That Nietzsche denied Cartesian objectivity does not mean he was anti-science. Rather, Nietzsche found a way to recognize the inescapable subjectivity of scientific inquiry while laying the foundation for meta-subjective agreement. Nietzsche simply re-focuses our attention on the radical subjectivity of science to deflect the futile desire to establish a subject-free epistemology of perfect objectivity: “We possess science nowadays precisely to the extent that we decided to accept the evidence of the senses…” (1998, 17). Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a kind of relativism in which all perspectives have equal epistemic value (Nehamas 1985, 49). Researching cinnamon teal by interviewing college students crossing the quad is an epistemically unsatisfactory alternative to visiting Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, talking with the manager, and making careful observations. Some perspectives are better than others, because some perspectives hold more promise for yielding relevant, constructively falsifiable hypotheses that can teach us something. A good researcher is good at coming up with good hypotheses. The standard of the truth or falsity of a perspective is not some God-like “view from eternity.” Rather, the standard of the truth or falsity of a perspective is logical coherence of the theory and support from empirical evidence. Good perspectives are woven into a collage of perspectives based on a variety of observations about the world. Objectivity arises through subjectivity—or more accurately, subjectivities: “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing;’ and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (Nietzsche 1989b, 119). Since a specific research program is likely to discover only a certain range of truths out of the total pool possible, the greater variety of research programs guided by the greatest mixture of researchers, all the better for natural science. This epistemology is perspectivism. The epistemology of perspectivism demands a methodology of pluralism. The geologist Chamberlin (1965, 754) outlined methodological pluralism for natural science with the theory of “multiple working hypotheses.” Chamberlin divided scientific methodology into three historical categories: (1) the method of the regnant, ruling theory (reminiscent of Kuhn’s dominant paradigm), (2) the method of the working hypothesis, and (3) the method of the multiple working hypotheses. In terms of scientific progress, Chamberlin characterizes the first stage as infantile because research is gauged to bolster the ruling theory—geocentric astronomy comes to mind—rather than to determine whether the ruling theory is in fact true [cf. Kuhn’s description of “normal science” (Sect. 6.2)]. This is a stage at which confirmation bias is likely to be a problem, where the scientist tends to seek data that confirm the preferred hypothesis and ignore or discount data that seem at odds with it. In the next stage, a hypothesis is not protected, but is subjected to rigorous testing. This, of course, is a vast improvement over the first method because the aim is the advancement of science rather than the advancement of a particular theory (and all of the political and economic power that goes with it). Best is the method of multiple working hypotheses, where a single subject-matter is treated by several plausible hypotheses in order to determine which one is best.

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Chamberlin’s method of multiple working hypotheses is methodological pluralism. The idea is that not only can there be competing hypotheses for explaining the matter of interest, but that they might all throw light on it. One hypothesis might ultimately be the most successful one for explaining or predicting the phenomenon under study, but others might also be of value. For example, suppose biologists wish to know what factors determine population size and trend of mule deer herds (Odocoileus hemionus). Obviously, there may be many different factors that play a role, so it makes sense to investigate as many of them as is feasible. Among the potential hypotheses are habitat quality and predation (there are others, but for simplicity we will focus on these two). It might turn out that both have an effect on mule deer population size and trend, but that one factor is more significant than the other. It might be, for example, that habitat quality is more significant than predation by cougars and other native carnivores. Methodological pluralism does not imply that all perspectives are equal: some are better informed than others. For example, scientists studying cinnamon teal would naturally be more interested in the opinions of hunters of cinnamon teal than people who merely casually observe them from time to time. In scientific ecology, a topic benefits from being studied by many different researchers from many different angles. Methodological pluralism in ecological investigation includes but is not limited to ecosystem ecology, evolutionary ecology, community ecology, population ecology, biogeochemistry, limnology, plant ecology, animal ecology, marine ecology, etcetera.

7.5 Conclusion The idea of ecology suggests an enigma: humans are as exceptional as we are unexceptional. We stand out as moral agents, but always—and only as—plain members of the ecological community. Human exceptionalism is a prominent trait of the Western mindset. Yet, the theme of human unexceptionalism is also well represented in Western thinking. it is expressed in the Genesis human creation myth that humans were formed “from the dust of the ground” (Bible 2.7, Revised Standard Version). Shakespeare critiques the dogma of human exceptionalism when he writes of Caesar in Hamlet. Holding Yorick’s skull, Hamlet marvels at the brute corporeality that bonds all temporal beings: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returned to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead, and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. Oh, that the earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw! (Bevington 2004, 1142).

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Biological evolution demolishes the anthropocentrism of Abraham and Plato and Descartes. As Darwin noted: “we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” (1981, 405). Not only are human beings close relatives of chimpanzees, we are related to the lowliest of life forms: worms, insects, plankton, slime mold. The principle of biological evolution by natural selection demonstrates that Homo sapiens shares a familial relationship with all other life. All life in the Earth biosphere evolved from a common ancestor. The ontology of life is a unity, an explicit message of the Origin: “all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction[.] Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (2003, 484). We now know—as Darwin did not—that all life, from bacterium to bear, share the same double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid. If all life has a common origin, then all life is interconnected in the most intimate way. Still, humans are exceptional for their ability to inquire into things, not to mention their ability to recognize the intrinsic value of their fellow biotic citizens. What other species studies and marvels at the structure and function of ecological communities? What other species studies other organisms? What other species laments the passing of another? Speaking of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and alluding to Ecclesiastes, Leopold wrote: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun[.] Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us” (1949, 110). Humans are unique in marveling at the beauty of biotic communities. We are also unique in mourning biodiversity loss and community degradation. Because of this capacity, humans also have a capacity for environmental virtue (Sect. 8.2).

References Bacon, Francis. 2002. The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bevington, David. 2004. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed., University of Chicago. Cain, Stanley A. 1947. Characteristics of Natural Areas and Factors in Their Development. Ecological Monographs 17: 185–200. Chamberlin, Thomas C. 1965. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. Science 148: 754–759. Copi, Irving M., and Carl Cohen. 2002. Introduction to Logic, 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Danto, Arthur C. 2005. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia University Press. Darlington, Philip J. 1957. Zoogeography: The Geographical Distribution of Animals. New York: Wiley.

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Elger, Frank E. 1947. Arid Southeast Oahu Vegetation, Hawaii. Ecological Monographs 17: 383–435. Elton, Charles S. 1935. Book Reviews. Journal of Animal Ecology 4: 148–149. Findlay, Alexander. 1965. A Hundred Years of Chemistry. London: Duckworth. Galilei, Galileo. 1960b (1622). The Assayer, trans. Stillman Drake. In The Controversy on the Comets of 1618: Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler, 151–336. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gause, George F. 1964. The Struggle for Existence. New York: Hafner Publishing Company. Goldsmith, F.B. 1994. Review of Shrader-Frechette and McCoy. Method in Ecology. Journal of Ecology 82 (4): 982–983. Gotelli, Nicholas J. 2001. A Primer of Ecology, 3rd ed. Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates. Gotelli, Nicholas J. 2006. Personal Communication. E-mail. September 14. Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns (eds.). 2005. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haskill, Edward F. 1940. Mathematical Systematization of ‘Environment’, ‘Organisms’, and ‘Habitat’. Ecology 21: 1–16. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heisenberg, Werner. 1983. The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics. In Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek, 62–84. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Originally published as Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik, Zeitschriff Für Physik 43 (1927): 172–198.). Hume, David. 2000. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2006a. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2006b. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2006c. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kneale, William C. 1949. Probability and Induction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levandowsky, Michael. 1977. A White Queen Speculation. Quarterly Review of Biology 52: 383–386. Lewontin, Richard (ed.). 1968. Population Biology and Evolution: Proceedings of the International Symposium Sponsored by Syracuse University and the New York Science and Technology Foundation, 7–9 June, 1967. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. Lotka, Alfred J. 1956. (1926). Elements of Mathematical Biology. New York: Dover. MacArthur, Robert H., and Edward O. Wilson. 1963. An Equilibrium Theory of Insular Zoography. Evolution 17: 373–387. MacArthur, Robert H., and Edward O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. MacArthur, Robert H. 1972. Geographical Ecology: Patterns in the Distribution of Species. New York: Harper & Row. Mackie, J.L. 1972. Mill’s Methods of Induction. In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5, 324–332. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. MacLulich, F.J.H. 1937. Fluctuations in the Numbers of the Varying Hare (Lepus americanus). University of Toronto Studies Biological Series No. 43. Margalef, Ramón D. 1963. On Certain Unifying Principles in Ecology. American Naturalist 97: 357–374. Mason, Herbert L. 1947. Evolution of Certain Floristic Associations in Western North America. Ecological Monographs 17: 201–210.

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Mayr, Ernst. 1976. Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Mill, John Stuart. 1874. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, 8th ed. New York: Harper & Brothers. Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Nicholson, A.J. 1954b. An Outline of the Dynamics of Animal Populations. Australian Journal of Zoology 2: 9–65. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 1968a. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968b. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989b. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Odum, Eugene P. 1971. Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Saunders. Odum, Howard T. 1957. Trophic Structure and Productivity of Silver Springs, Florida. Ecological Monographs 27: 55–112. Odum, Howard T. 1960. Ecological Potential and Analogue Circuits for the Ecosystem. American Scientist 48: 1–8. Pearl, Raymond, and Lowell J. Reed. 1920. On the Rate of Growth of the Population of the United States Since 1790 and Its Mathematical Representation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 6: 275–288. Pearl, Raymond. 1925. The Biology of Population Growth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Peters, Robert H. 1991. A Critique for Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, Karl R. 1977. The Bucket and the Searchlight: Two Theories of Knowledge. In Discovering philosophy, ed. Matthew Lipman, 328–334. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Reichenbach, Hans. 1951. The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 269–311. New York: Tudor. Revkin, Andrew C. 2005a. No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum. The New York Times (October 25): D1, D4. Revkin, Andrew C. 2005b. No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum. The New York Times (October 25): F1. Rodis-Lewis, Geneviéve. 2005. Descartes’ Life and the Development of His Philosophy. In The Cambridge companion to descartes, ed. John Cottingham, 21–57. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shrader-Frechette, Kristin S., and Earl D. McCoy. 1993. Method in Ecology: Strategies for Conservation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shrader-Frechette, Kristin S., and Earl D. McCoy. 2000. Community Ecology, Population Biology, and the Method of Case Studies. In The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. Keller and Golley, 153–169. Simberloff, Daniel S. 1981. The Sick Science of Ecology: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Prescription. Eidema 1: 49–54. Slobodkin, Lawrence B. 1975. Comments from a Biologist to a Mathematician. In Ecosystem Analysis and Prediction: Proceedings of SIAM-SIMS Conference on Ecosystems, ed. S.A. Levin, Alta, Utah, 1–5 July, 318–329. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2004. World Population to 2300. New York: United Nations. Vandermeer, John. 1981. Elementary Mathematical Ecology. New York: Wiley. Werner, Earl E., and Gary G. Mittelbach. 1981. Optimal Foraging: Field Tests of Diet Choice and Habitat Switching. American Zoologist 21: 813–829. Williams, Bernard. 1972. Rationalism. In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, 69–75. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Woodell, S.R.J. 1992. Review of Peters, A Critique for Ecology. Journal of Ecology 80 (2): 374–375.

Part IV

The Normativity of Ecology

Chapter 8

Ethics of Ecology

Abstract Ethics concerns how one ought to live one’s life. The aim of an ethics of ecology is to help us avoid disturbing the ecological integrity, stability and beauty of nature. This is in turn a necessary condition for bringing about ecological justice, understood as comprised of justice to both human and nonhuman organisms and systems. Because humans are moral agents embedded in biotic communities, our actions inescapably impact other beings worthy of moral consideration. A moral agent is free, in the sense of having a range of possible choices about how to treat other beings worthy of moral consideration. Reason demands that we strive to make our moral judgments comprehensive, consistent, coherent, and verifiable. Yet there remains the question of what makes a being or ecosystem worthy of moral consideration: what gives it value such that we should value it? Here we face the “is/ought gap” between descriptions and prescriptions, which rests on the ontological distinction between mind and matter. Bridging the gap first requires abandoning the metaphysics of mind-matter dualism and the mechanical view of nature. Second, it requires bioempathy. Bioempathy is a natural response to recognition of the beauty of organisms and ecosystems. Thus, aesthetics takes us from cognizance of facts to appreciation of natural value.

You are a moral agent in a biotic community. How ought you best live your life? Morality is a matter of making thoughtful judgments about how one ought to live and living accordingly. Moral judgments differ from judgments of ordinary preference, such as style of clothing or spiciness of food, by taking into consideration the potential impacts of one’s actions on other beings worthy of moral consideration. Some things are worthy of moral consideration and others are not. Choosing sandstone over granite for a walkway is not an overtly moral decision because the stone that will be cut into slabs is not a proper object of moral consideration. Injuring a person is different. If spouses are worthy of moral consideration, then beating your spouse makes you morally culpable. If sentient nonhuman beings are worthy of moral consideration, then kicking your neighbor’s dog makes you blameworthy. If biotic communities are worthy of moral consideration, then dumping poison into the watershed makes you blameworthy. It is one of the theses of this book that sentient © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 D. R. Keller, Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities, Studies in Global Justice 19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_8

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beings and biotic communities are worthy of moral consideration. But treating them right requires moral sensibility. Moral sensibility is innate to humans. Immanuel Kant famously marveled, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (2006, 133). As beings possessing moral sensibility, we cannot avoid making moral judgments, i.e., judgments of right and wrong. Nor can we avoid responsibility for our actions. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre averred, “In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing” (2003, 235). Choosing not to choose is still choosing. Intentional inaction is itself a form of action. Because we humans possess moral sensibility, we are inescapably moral agents. A moral agent has the capacity to make judgments about what other beings are worthy of moral consideration as well as about how they ought to be treated. The classes ‘moral agent’ and ‘worthy of moral consideration’ are not equivalent: some beings are morally considerable (infants, demented persons, living things, sentient animals, or entire ecological communities) but are not themselves moral agents. Possession of freedom to choose and act makes moral agents responsible for their actions and open to moral praise or blame by other moral agents. There are several ways to make judgments: one might defer to authority, flip a coin, act from passion, or use reason. Ethics (Moral Philosophy) employs the last approach. Thus, while moral sensibility is innate to humans, reason is necessary for educating that sensibility. Ethical theories can help with this. They can be evaluated according to four criteria: comprehensiveness, consistency, coherence, and verifiability (Ferré 1998, 2–4). (1) Comprehensive reasoning must incorporate all relevant information into the theory and not leave out any obviously relevant information. (2) Consistent reasoning is not logically contradictory. That is, no ethical theory should permit contradictory judgments, such as an unqualified proscription against killing and also qualified permission to kill. (3) Coherent reasoning must link all involved concepts in a unified and integrated theoretical whole. A theory might be incoherent, in the sense that its parts do not cohere, but still be consistent in the sense that its parts are not straightforwardly contradictory. (4) Verifiable reasoning produces conclusions that can be tested against the empirical facts. The study of ethics is divided into two categories: metaethics and normative ethics (Nielsen 1967, 118–19). Metaethics is concerned with general questions about theories of ethics, such as what criteria a theory of ethics should satisfy. Examples of metaethical questions are the problem of realism versus relativism (Sects. 6.2–6.4) and the significance of the is/ought gap (Sect. 8.1 below). Normative ethics attempts to provide action-guiding prescriptions that can be used by moral agents in making value judgments and in acting. In the context of the biosphere, normative ethics is action-guiding in that it provides prescriptions for the way we humans ought best to live our lives as citizens of biotic communities. Because humans are members of biotic communities, our actions inexorably impact other beings worthy of moral consideration. This requires an ecological ethic.

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And this in turn requires (1) environmental metaethics and (2) environmental normative ethics, which will provide the framework for an elaboration of (3) three principles of ecological justice.

8.1 Environmental Metaethics: Bridging the Is/Ought Gap Naturalism in ethics is possible. This is evident in the environmental philosophy of the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, and its more precise and nuanced elaboration by American philosopher J. Baird Callicott. The key to naturalism in ethics is the abandonment of the mechanical view of nature, thereby avoiding the problem of an “is/ought gap” or diremption between moral descriptions and prescriptions.

8.1.1 The Is/Ought Diremptionists The main objection to metaethical naturalism is the purported existence of an unbridgeable gap, or diremption, between facts and values. This is the fact/value or is/ought problem (Hudson 1969, 11–31). From the Italian Renaissance to the European Enlightenment, the natural sciences (in German the naturwissenschaften) have been considered distinct from the sciences of the human spirit (in German the geisteswissenschaften). This school holds that the subject matter of each (God and the human soul on one hand and natural process on the other) are fundamentally different, and therefore so also must be their methodologies. The machinery of nature is characterized by material and efficient causation and the domain of the human soul and the divine is characterized by not being subject to material and efficient causation. To use the terminology of Aristotle (McKeon 1941, 752), the natural sciences study material and efficient causation whereas the humanities study formal and final causation. The existence of a schism or diremption between the natural sciences and the humanities is premised on a metaphysics of mechanism (Sect. 3.1) and an objectivist epistemology of realism (Sect. 6.1). If nature has no value or purpose in the way it operates (if it is just a machine), then the study of nature must itself be value-free. The scientist must therefore “bracket” socially-constructed prejudices (vide Sect. 6.2) in order to get at the objective facts. A male Scandinavian Lutheran scientist, a Chinese Taoist scientist, an Italian Catholic scientist, an English atheist scientist, and a female Japanese Buddhist scientist can each bracket socially-inculcated prejudices to attain knowledge of the same truths through formulation and testing of hypotheses, independent of culture (cf. Sect. 6.4). On this view, the naturwissenschaften are completely “value-free.” Facts relate to nature and values relate to culture. It is illegitimate to equivocate between or conflate the two. The fact/value diremption was famously articulated by David Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume recalls his reaction to reading most moral philosophy: “I

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am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d” (1978, 469). Interpreters have not been unanimous about what exactly Hume meant. Some believe Hume is asserting the existence of an unbridgeable chasm between normative and descriptive sentences. Others believe that Hume is not saying it is impossible to derive an ought from an is, only that if such an inference is to be made, the connection needs to be fully explicated. The second view is most sensible, although it obviously relies on a notion of ‘derive’ quite different from ‘deduce’, where a conclusion is deduced from the premises of a valid argument. Diremptionists argue that it is logically impossible to deduce value-laden statements, such as moral prescriptions, from factual descriptions. The only way to move via deduction from the observation that a child has wandered onto a highway to the imperative “Retrieve the child” is another normative assumption that allowing children to wander onto highways is bad, and that bad things ought to be remedied. In other words, diremptionists say, there is no way to get from descriptions to prescriptions by way of logical inference, since any prescription presupposes some other prescription. Correlatively, so diremptionists believe, values are not facts because values are not embedded in the essence of things—that is, values are not objectively real. English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said “questions as to ‘values’ lie wholly outside the domain of knowledge. That is to say, when we assert that this or that has ‘value,’ we are giving expression to our own emotions, not to a fact” (1961, 230–31). In addition, according to English philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958), values such as goodness, while real, are non-natural properties of things—which is to say that prescriptions for behavior (how one ought to treat something) cannot be deduced from descriptions of things. To attempt this folly is to commit what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy” (Moore 2000, 62). Obviously, without the option of appealing to “non-natural” properties of nature, or something of the kind, ecological ethics is impossible.

8.1.2 Aldo Leopold Leopold ignored the alleged schism or diremption between the natural sciences and humanities. He scorns any “…ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets” (1949, 153). Rejecting the diremption enables Leopold to ignore the is/ought deductive gap and “derive” prescriptions from descriptions by a different route. The kernel of insight Leopold drew from ecology is the fundamental ontological interconnectedness of biotic communities. Based on his own observations and reflections, he predicted that the elimination of predators from a landscape would result in overpopulation of the prey species (Leopold 1946). Excessive killing of wolves and

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mountain lions results in deer overpopulation and consequent soil erosion, and ultimately leads to degradation of the entire ecological community. (While hunters may view the killing of wolves positively, the mountain may “think” otherwise (1949, 130).) Leopold’s ethics is focused on the biotic community. Leopold introduced The Land Ethic with three basic ideas: the Community Concept, Ecological Conscience, and Ecological Literacy. The Community Concept is the idea that the ontological interconnectedness of the members of ecological communities mandates the extension of moral consideration from the human community to the ecological community. The Community Concept recognizes that biotic systems are integrated functional wholes that include the biota and the inanimate substrata (or environmental matrix) of minerals and water.1 The Community Concept “…simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (idem, 204). Leopold illustrates the Community Concept by representing an ecological community as a land pyramid (Fig. 8.1). At the base of the pyramid is soil, where detrivores break down dead organic matter to form humus. Members of the soil layer are the most numerous in the community. Next are plants, which grow from the soil, and then insects, which feed on plants. Above are herbivores and omnivores. Humans share this niche with squirrels, bears, and raccoons (in direct opposition to The Great Chain of Being—vide Sect. 2.1). The top consists of large carnivores. Each descending layer of the pyramid contains more individuals, represented by the widening of layers. The base contains the most individuals; the apex the fewest. “The species of a layer are alike not in where they come from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat. Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above” (1949, 215). Death and decay of all living beings returns nutrients to the base of the pyramid, thus resulting in nutrient cycling. Biodiversity is a key aspect of land pyramids. Evolution increases biodiversity by adding species to the layers and layers to the pyramid. If the top layers of the pyramid are removed or severely damaged, layers lower down may be radically altered as a result. System collapse may occur from the disruption of the normal “trophic cascade” (Paine, 1980) process of energy flow through the land pyramid when the top layer of apex predators, such as wolves, is removed. Understanding and acknowledgement of the reality of the ecological community, including humans as plain members, can engender an ecological conscience. Ecological conscience is the extension of moral consideration from members of the human social community to members of the nonhuman ecological community. Leopold describes this in terms of an “ethical sequence” (idem, 202–03). To illustrate, Leopold alludes to slavery and violence in Homer. “Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus’ Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife 1 The

adjective ‘land’ to qualify ‘ethic’ is misleading because The Land Ethic, as sketched by Leopold, includes terrestrial and aquatic biotic communities. The choice of the word ‘land’ is stylistic and reflects Leopold’s continentally-oriented experiences in the desert Southwest and upper Plains of North America. The more accurate description is Biotic Community Ethics, based on the provisional ethical tenet of Ecocentrism (Sect. 8.3).

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Fig. 8.1 Leopold’s land pyramid

through the long years before at last his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home” (1949, 201–202). But in Odysseus’ Greece it was also acceptable to murder disobedient female slaves (Homer 1996, 453–54). Leopold explains that the moral community at that point in history did not extend to property, and that some property was human property: “The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels” (Leopold 1949, 202). Gradually, over several millennia, previously excluded groups (such as slaves) have been granted moral consideration: “During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only” (ibid.). Development of an ecological conscience is a consequence of “a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures” (Leopold 1949, 109) achieved by “warm personal” caring for fauna and flora, as we do friends and family (Flader and Callicott 1991, 337). Organic and systematic entities (Sect. 3.3) are seen as subjects in their own right, worthy of moral consideration. As philosopher Eric Katz states: “we must treat the natural world as an autonomous subject, worthy of moral respect” (Katz 1997, xxvi). The members of the biotic communities are like citizens of a polity. An ecological conscience “…changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1949, 204). Abdication of the role of land conqueror is in our self-interest as well, since the role of the conqueror must ultimately be self-defeating for our species (ibid.). Development of an ecological conscience is aided by development of ecological literacy. Ecological literacy is expertise in the “languages” of biotic communities. It is the ability to “read” the land in terms of natural history and natural science

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(Leopold 1949, 174). The language of natural science is the formal language of logic and mathematics (Sect. 7.2) and the language of aesthetics includes the nondiscursive languages of poetry and music (Sect. 6.3). Fluency in the language of aesthetics is as matter of sensitivity to natural beauty. Leopold insists that both types of fluency are necessary for ecological literacy. The type of learning required for attaining ecological literacy also has an aesthetic aspect. The unique character of a biotic community is knowable only through direct, personal unmitigated experience—experience that is enriched by a knowledge of natural history and ecological science. Such experience is properly described as aesthetic. Examples of such experience might involve such things as watching a beaver at work, a pack of wolves take down an elk, or laying submerged in mud in order to glimpse grebes (Leopold 1949, 160). Leopold uses the metaphor of a symphony to describe what it is like to know a biotic community intimately. The skilled listener grasps the structure of the musical composition and is able to discern each instrument and its role in the overall melody (idem, 161). Leopold’s metaethical naturalism provides a normative framework for the derivation of prescriptions about biotic communities from descriptions of biotic communities. Biotic communities can be said to be healthy or unhealthy, flourishing or ailing: “An ecological system is healthy…if it is stable and sustainable—that is, if it is active and maintains its organization and autonomy over time and is resilient to stress” (Costanza et al. 1992, 9). Since health is directly and ontologically connected with beauty, an action is morally wrong if it degrades and damages the aesthetic qualities of the biotic community (Heffernan 1982, 237). Leopold names this moral maxim The Land Ethic: “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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, 242). Leopold is less interested in instructing us on what we should think than in inviting us to think about our relationship to ecological communities from the point of view of ecological citizenship. A Sand County Almanac is an invitation to reflect on one’s own ecological citizenship.

8.1.3 J. Baird Callicott Callicott develops the nuances of Leopold’s moral insight into a systematic metaethics. He argues that the entire enterprise of mainstream Occidental moral philosophy, which has been based on individualism—including Animal Welfare ethics (e.g. Singer 1975; Regan 1983) and Biocentrism (Naess 2008; Taylor 1986)—must be abandoned in favor of an ethical holism. Callicott observes that we value some things for themselves, above and beyond utility. For parents of a newborn baby, part of the infant’s value is instrumental for the happiness and joy it brings them. It also has a kind of noninstrumental value. “But

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it ‘has’—that is, there is conferred or projected upon it, by those who value it for its own sake—something more than instrumental value, since it is valued for itself as well as for the joy or other utility it affords them” (1989, 161). Similarly, people own pets for a variety of egoistic reasons: companionship, protection, and so on. Yet, by also cherishing their pet’s unique personality, pet owners value the pet for itself, for being the subject of its own life. We can also value ecological communities as we do pets—for their own intrinsic value, independently of the resource value they have for us (Sects. 2.1, 3.2 and 8.3). Why do we value some things non-instrumentally? Why aren’t we pure egoists? To answer these questions, Callicott situates the ecological conscience of Leopold (1949, 207–10) in the biosocial moral tradition of Smith (2009), Hume (1978), Darwin (1981), and Wilson (1980), arguing that the feelings or sentiments of benevolence and sympathy are written into our genetic code. In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues that the phenomenon of morality can be explained in terms of natural selection. All animals “which defend themselves or attack their enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one another[;] With those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers” (Darwin 1981, 78–79, 80). Some kind of sympathetic instinct is essential for social animals. Individuals who lack this instinct die off without reproducing at rates equal to or higher than their sociable counterparts. In humans, this proclivity to live together manifests itself in “sympathy” and “beneficence” and “altruism.” Furthermore, selection operates at the level of whole communities as well as at the level of individuals: “In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (idem, 82). Callicott refers to the human tendency to value other beings for their own sake as “bioempathy.” Bioempathy enhances our own species’ chance for survival, as well as that of other species, and is therefore simple prudence (Callicott 1989, 69–70). Bioempathy, not reason, is what provides a bridge from “is” to “ought”. The bridge is thus not a logical bridge, but a psychological or motivational one. The diremptionists are right that there is no deductive way of bridging the gap between “is” and “ought”, but wrong in thinking that there is no way of crossing the divide. The axiology of Callicott’s biotic community ethics is nonegalitarian and nonanthropocentric because the metaphysics shifts the primary loci of moral consideration from individual organisms to ecological wholes (or ecological communities). An individual organism has intrinsic value, but also has value (or disvalue) insofar as it contributes to or undermines the integrity and stability and beauty of the ecological community. Thus, individual organisms have varying value and disvalue for the ecological communities they inhabit. Biotic community ethics “…manifestly does not accord equal moral worth to each and every member of the ecological community” (1989, 28). The primary locus of value is the organic whole. “An environmental

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ethic which takes as its summum bonum the integrity, stability and beauty of the ecological community is not conferring moral standing on something else besides plants, animals, soils, and waters. Rather, the former, the good of the community as a whole, serves as a standard for the assessment of the relative value and relative ordering of its constitutive parts and therefore provides a means of adjudicating the often mutually contradictory demands of the parts considered separately for equal consideration” (1989, 25. See also Costanza et al. 1992, 9; Callicott 1999, 345). The nonegalitarianism of biotic community ethics is apparent in the issue of feral goats and pigs in fragile tropical island communities. In Hawaii and the Galápagos, non-native pigs (Sus scrofa) and goats (Capra hircus) severely degrade the structure and function of ecological communities by denuding the vegetation and exacerbating soil erosion (Loope et al. 1988, 275; Burdick 1994, 55). When organisms have disvalue (negative extrinsic value) for the integrity of the ecological community, the eradication of even highly sentient animals (Stone and Keith 1987, 277–79) is justified. Goats and pigs are highly sentient animals and an ethical holism may inveigh against their interests (Keller 1997). Biotic community ethics therefore opposes animal welfare ethics, which either locates the locus of moral considerability in the capacity to suffer (Singer 1974) or subjects of a life (Regan 1983). This, however, does not negate the relevance of the capacity for suffering or being the subject of a life with respect to the intrinsic value of individual organisms—it merely shifts the emphasis to the health of the entire community of life. Particular moral judgments may therefore have to weigh competing claims against one another. If the species in question is invasive and destructive to the biotic community, that counts strongly against it. This goes for humans as much as any other species. Poaching of endangered plants and animals ought to be prevented by the most human methods available. On the other hand, if the species in question is native and it functions to restore and maintain biotic diversity and health to the biotic community, as in the case of wolves in most landscapes of the American West, that counts strongly in favor of its reintroduction and protection. Again, in all cases, the move from “is” to “ought” is mediated by bioempathy—bioempathy that is informed and enhanced by a knowledge of pertinent scientific facts and by personal experience in the field, observing and getting to know the elements of the whole and their interactions. We can call this “reading” the land. Leopold and Callicott provide a way in which the gap between “is” and “ought—between descriptions and prescriptions—in our treatment of biotic communities can be circumvented. The transition is facilitated, not by a logical step of reason, nor by an illogical leap of faith, but by bioempathy—a natural human response to the beauty of nature. Uniformity of judgment from one person or culture to another will be facilitated by shared knowledge of the scientific facts and similar experiences as informed by those facts. This will in turn facilitate ecological justice. Eugene Odum was congratulated—and criticized—for explicitly connecting the Naturwissenschaften to the Geisteswissenschaften. Odum did this in the form of environmental public policy (Craige 2001, xvii, 41, 45, 64). The work of Leopold and Callicott removes the metaethical problem of the is/ought gap by teaching that values are grounded in facts, and in doing so they vindicate Odum.

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8.2 Environmental Normative Ethics: Reading the Land Think of the land as a text. If the land is a text, it can be read. Readings are acts of interpretation. Acts of interpretation are in part artistic acts. Artistic acts vary vastly in quality. Some are skilled and some are unskilled. Some are masterful and some are inept. As with texts, so with the land. Skillful reading of the land is motivated by and engenders bioempathy, which in turn provides a basis for ethical behavior toward the land, including the knowledge and sense of duty requisite for being a good citizen of the biotic community. One method of reading the land is Ecological Hermeneutics (Keller 1998; EsbjörnHargens and Zimmerman 2009, 505). Ecological hermeneutics is based on the moral philosophy of Aristotle. The (1) review of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics sets the stage for (2) a sketch of ecological hermeneutics.

8.2.1 Aristotelian Virtue Ethics Aristotle was the first philosopher to use the word ‘ethics’ (ethike arête) in his “emphasis is on character and its proper development rather than on the rules for the propriety of rational motives” (Rorty 1980, 2). Aristotle emphasized the importance of the disposition of the ethically good person—that is to say, the type of person to make good moral judgments and thus to live life well. Aristotle’s goal was to show that the “ultimate end or goal” (telos) of human life is eudaemonia: happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, living well. Aristotle was concerned with identifying the highest human capacity which, when actualized, results in eudaemonia. A virtuous person is one who functions in such a way as to actualize his or her human potential of achieving eudaemonia; virtuous action is the means by which our potential for eudaemonia is actualized. Once we identify the highest human capacity, we discover what activity most fully actualizes eudaemonia. It is the most virtuous activity humans can engage in. Aristotle ultimately wants to offer a description of the virtuous person and the kind of life this person tends to lead. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle asks: What is the highest human good? As an empiricist, he settles for what both commoners and the educated elite call it: happiness, living well (McKeon 1941, 937). Whatever this life is, it must be a life in which happiness is complete (idem, 941) and self-sufficient (idem, 942). Eudaemonia is the end manifestation of our function as human beings. It is important to know what kind of life the happy person leads. In De Anima and Politics, Aristotle appeals to teleology: “Nature never makes anything without a purpose and never leaves out what is necessary” (idem, 597); “Nature…makes nothing in vain” (idem, 1129). Applying teleological reasoning to ethics, he avers that we could give a clearer account of eudaemonia “if we could first ascertain the function of man” (idem, 942). In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle (idem, 942) identifies different aspects of the soul, each with a certain function: one of nutrition and growth (which we share with plants and nonhuman animals), one of sense percep-

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tion and locomotion (which we share with nonhuman animals), and reason (which is unique to humans). It follows that reason must have some role in the realization of virtuous character (idem, 942). The rational capacity to synthesize many different activities into a good life is practical wisdom (phronesis). Thomas Nagel remarks: “eudaemonia essentially involves not just the activity of the theoretical intellect but the full range of human life and action, in accordance with the broader excellences of moral virtue and practical wisdom” (Rorty 1980, 7). Rationality in the form of practical wisdom is a mark of virtuous character. The actions of virtuous persons express right reason (McKeon 1941, 953). The person of virtuous character is able to organize many life-affecting elements into a smoothly functioning existence, like the legislator who organizes the polis into a smoothly functioning whole. Ethical behavior requires that a person with experience and practical wisdom evaluate the rationales supporting alternative moral actions and act on the one that is best. Value judgments “depend on particular facts, and the decision rests with [the] perception” of the person with virtuous character informed by right reason (idem, 964). In Aristotelian ethics, environmental virtue can be defined as the disposition of moral agents to act as good citizens of the biotic community. Good citizens promote the flourishing or health of the biotic community; bad citizens damage the biotic community. The moral philosophy of Aristotle has been elaborated by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and American philosopher Bernard Gert (1934–2011). According to Gadamer, Aristotelian philosophy of science is experiential rather than logocentric—just the reverse of modern (Cartesian) philosophy of science. This has implications for ethics. Gadamer judges the Cartesian notion of detached subjectivity (the mind as a thinking thing distinct from matter), presupposed in modern science, to be problematic. The science of modernity, based on the metaphysics of a Cartesian subject (the self or mind) as a detached observer of the objective, corporeal world, holds that one can understand the nature of an ecological community using a rationalist methodology (Sect. 7.2). The Aristotelian worldview Gadamer retrieves opposes this: ratiocination, and hence science, takes place in a spatio-temporal context—that is, a historical and cultural context—and cannot be separated from it. There is no supernatural, detached, purely objective point of view. Consequently, whereas modern philosophy of science holds that scientific theories must conform to a priori principles of reason as a necessary starting point for empirical inquiry, Aristotelian science holds that scientific inquiry begins with practical experience and culminates in theory. Instead of moving from pure theory to practice, we actually do the reverse: we move from practical experience to the formulation of theory. Theories are then tested against further experience. Thus, empirical inquiry into the workings of nature—i.e., learning to read the biotic community—is necessarily a hermeneutical enterprise: “As far as hermeneutics is concerned it is quite to the point to confront [a] the separation of theory from practice entailed in the modern notion of theoretical science and practical-technical application with [b] an idea of knowledge that has taken the opposite path leading from practice toward making it aware of itself theoretically” (Gadamer 1989, 131). Consonant with the epistemology of Kant and

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Popper (Sect. 7.3), “The point here is a notion of science that does not allow for the ideal of the nonparticipating observer” (1989, 135). The implication for ecological ethics is clear. In order for ethics to be either pertinent or adequate to human relationships with the biotic communities of which humans are members, it must be founded on direct, unmitigated experience of those communities—experience that both guides and informs scientific inquiry. Unlike the rationalist methodology of Descartes, this method of inquiry will result in the development of ecological conscience (bioempathy) and ecological literacy in human members of biotic communities; and will consequently serve to make us better, more ethical members, of the community. Bernard Gert’s (1934–2011 CE) moral philosophy is based on a description of the “common morality” of humans.2 From this description Gert infers general rules of conduct. Gert asks, how do people actually act? He does not create a new ethical system but rather systematizes and justifies universal features of empirically observable moral behavior (vide Gert in Sinnott-Armstrong and Audi 2002, 293). Common morality is based on universal features of human nature (Gert 2004, v, 8, 2005, xi). Bernard Gert aligns himself with Aristotle by identifying human flourishing, rather than a Platonic supernatural ideal, as a proper goal for rational persons (Gert 2005, 260). Aristotelian philosophy of education asserts that virtue in disposition (ethike arête) is inculcated in youth (McKeon 1941, 1109). Virtue is taught to children less through abstract rules and principles than learning by example and experience from adults (Gert 2005, xiii). Gert explicitly rejects the rigid deontology of Kant and consequentialism of Mill on the simple ground that they yield incorrect answers (Gert 2005, viii). In some cases, duties must be foresworn (Keller 2010, 37–38) and in other cases moral action cannot be gauged solely in terms of consequences (idem, 35–36). As an alternative to teaching children abstract a priori rules and principles, Gert emphasizes the “importance of the virtues and of bringing up children in the right way” (Gert 2005, xiii. Cf. Aristotle in McKeon 1941, 1109). By observing adults, children learn moral behavior. (Gert 2004, 76). Through practice and habit formation the predilection for moderation (hexis) and eudaemonia is attained. Gert (2010, 67, 80) also aligns himself with Hobbes (1985, 183–88) by grounding the rational justification for morality in human vulnerability. It is rational to take action to avoid calamity in the face of brutal corporality (Gert 2004, 84, 2005, 9).3 If the purpose of morality is avoidance of calamity, and ecological calamity causes acute suffering to humans and other sentient beings, then averting damage to biotic communities (directly or indirectly) is the proper province of morality.

2 Admirers

of Gert’s work are acquainted with its anthropocentric orientation: “Morality, in the basic sense with which I am concerned, guides behaviour only insofar as that behaviour, directly or indirectly, affects other people” (Gert 2004, 7). However, he leaves open the possibility of widening the scope of moral consideration: there are a lot of rational persons who are concerned with the consequences for nonhuman sentient beings (idem, 128). 3 Gert condemns consequentialism as inadequate (Gert 2005, 214–16), but his ethical theory has strong consequentialistic tendencies. This has led Sinnott-Armstrong to label Gert a “closet consequentialist” (Sinnott-Armstrong and Audi 2002, 293).

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Gert’s reading of Aristotle and Hobbes brings us to the ecological pragmatism of Leopold and Callicott: it is human self-interest to extend moral consideration to the biotic communities we inhabit. However, the rationale for doing so would seem to be the purely anthropocentric concern for human flourishing. There is no obvious room in Gert’s moral philosophy for bioempathy to play a significant role. Nevertheless, Gert’s approach upholds the Socratic ideal that insight into moral problems can be gained through reasoned dialogue by competent, ecologically-literate interlocutors. This conception of morality promotes constructive political discourse (Gert 2004, 147). Gert’s metaethics is pluralist (idem, vii). He sides with the view that not “all controversial moral issues can be resolved” (idem, 12). Moral problems that are intractable are moral dilemmas. Moral dilemmas are situations in which a moral agent has two mutually exclusive moral duties or obligations. If the moral agent avoids one horn of the dilemma, she is impaled on the other (Keller 2010, 3). In such situations it may be that both alternatives are equally rational and seemingly right, yet only one is possible. Thus, different moral agents may agree on the goodness and badness of actions affecting ecological communities yet disagree on the hierarchical ranking of those benefits and harms. Gert avoids the apparent contradiction between metaethical objectivism and metaethical pluralism by arguing that rational agents may agree on goods and harms but rank them in different hierarchies (Gert 2004, 14–15. See also Copp in Sinnott-Armstrong and Audi 2002, 90). Based on different rankings, different rational agents may choose mutually exclusive acts (Gert 2004, 98).

8.2.2 Environmental Hermeneutics We now have all the ingredients of environmental hermeneutics, understood as a theory of what it means to be a good citizen in the biotic community. It is a purely naturalistic theory that gives empirical truth its due and avoids the pitfall of the naturalistic fallacy by recognizing that the bridge from “is” to “ought”, from description to prescription, is provided by a blend of understanding and emotion—a blend of cognition and conation—that produces ethically appropriate behavior. An ethically competent member of a biotic community is a person who is cognizant of and cares about the good of the community as a whole, and who is moved by this understanding and empathy to practice good citizenship in the community (environmental virtue, characterized by bioempathy). Environmental hermeneutics has several core features: It is naturalistic, empiricist, aesthetic, objective, consequentialist and pluralistic. The moral agent who exemplifies these characteristic is ecologically literate and practices environmental virtue. The consequence is ecological justice. Environmental hermeneutics is naturalistic in the sense that it accepts a monistic metaphysics of a single fundamental substance—something like Whitehead’s bipolar matter-mind.

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Environmental hermeneutics is empiricist because it rejects all so-called a priori or purely rational methods of attempting to grasp the structures and processes of nature in favor of rationally guided empirical observation and inquiry into them. Environmental hermeneutics is aesthetic because it recognizes beauty as a real feature of nature that can be experienced and appreciated. Environmental hermeneutics is objective in that the standards of correct moral action are not contingent upon culture but hold true for all moral agents in all places at all times (Keller 2010, 15). Informed interpretations of our place in the natural order pay attention to the universal features of human citizens of biotic communities that transcend the peculiarities of culture—for example, Leopold’s observation that we are not overlords, but “plain members and citizens of the biotic community” (1949). Environmental hermeneutics is consequentialist in that good actions are measured in terms of their consequences, not for human happiness as in utilitarianism, but as defined, for example, by Leopold’s Land Ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to…. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1949). Environmental hermeneutics is pluralistic in that it recognizes both the ineliminability of human ignorance and the possibility of different hierarchies of value with respect to the same set of facts—there need not be one unique solution, no objective fact of the matter—for every moral dilemma. This parallels Aristotle’s point in the Nicomachean Ethics that moral/political wisdom can never be as precise as knowledge of arithmetic since human activities “admit of much variety and fluctuation” (McKeon 1941, 936). Gadamer echoes Aristotle: “It would appear that the domain of human affairs is one that chiefly falls into the realm of chance” (1989, 8). Rather than aiming at the ideal of “being able to explain a fact completely through deriving all its conditions…the well-known ideal of natural scientific knowledge” (idem, 105)—the ideal of Cartesian science—hermeneutics claims to be “no more than an approximation: only an attempt, plausible and fruitful, but clearly never definitive” (ibid.). There can be no rigorous method for ascertaining whether a certain technological-industrial practice is or is not justified in the context of biotic communities.4 Ultimately, ethical judgments rest with ecologically-literate competent judges with astute perception. The Aristotelian moral philosophies of Gadamer and Gert point to the necessity of a robust conception of moral virtue for environmental normative ethics. Virtue ethics emphasizes the dispositions—the personality traits and habits—of the morally good person in a community. The virtuous person most fully actualizes the potential for flourishing of the biotic community. It is obvious that rules have something to do with ethics, but such rules are not always utterly clear and exceptionless. Further, adhering to a moral rule requires a disposition to do so. If one does not see oneself as a citizen of the biotic community and feel a kinship and love for other members of the community, then one will have no motive for considering the systemic ecological consequences of one’s actions on other citizens in the community. It is imperative that 4 Just

because humans can do something does not mean that we should do it. Gadamer asks: “For whose benefit is the work being accomplished? And how much do the achievements of technology serve life?” (1989, 71).

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humans see themselves as citizens of biotic communities and not merely citizens of the polis; humans are also citizens of biotic communities (Sandler and Cafaro 2005). The ethics of ecology, both as metaethics and normative ethics, enjoins the human moral agent to interpret one’s place in the biotic community, and adjust one’s actions accordingly. This involves inculcation of environmental virtue, education in ecological literacy, and skill in reading the land. When enough human members of the biotic community have attained this skill, ecological justice will be within reach.

8.3 Three Models for Ecological Ethics The metaethics and normative ethics of ecology suggest three principles for the ethics of ecology: (1) Ecocentrism, (2) Nonanthropocentrism, and (3) Nonegalitarianism.

8.3.1 Ecocentrism Ecocentrism is an axiology that identifies biotic communities as worthy of moral consideration. Ecocentrism is thus a form of holism. The summum bonum of an ethics based on the axiology of ecocentrism is the health and flourishing of the ecological entity as a whole. In a local context, this consists of the biotic community. In the global context, this consists of the biosphere.

8.3.2 Nonanthropocentrism An axiology of nonanthropocentrism posits the moral considerability of nonhuman beings as well as of human beings. They possess intrinsic value, as well as extrinsic value for each other as interdependent members of a biotic community (Ferré 1996, 23). These different values must be compared and weighed by an applied ethics of ecology despite a lack of discrete, identifiable units of measure. The source of intrinsic value, on Whiteheadian metaphysics and axiology, is novelty or creative impulse embedded in the constitution of nature itself (Sect. 3.2). Continuity and plenitude (Sect. 2.1) characterize the natural order. Natural living systems exhibit teleonomy (Sect. 2.1), creativity (Sect. 3.4) and stochasticity (Sect. 4.3). Synergies underlying the structure and function of ecological communities produce emergent properties (Sect. 5.2). “This need not be self-conscious experience, but intrinsically satisfying experiences of a wide range of sharpness and complexity are not hard to imagine[.] We need not be talking in metaphors when we speak of contented cows and happy clams” (Ferré 1996, 23). Nonanthropocentrism refutes the instrumentalism of Abrahamism (Leopold 1949, viii). The Abrahamic view of the land asserts that nonhuman nature has value only

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insofar as it benefits people because only humans exhibit preference (vide Sects. 2.1 and 9.1–9.3). Economist William Baxter famously defended the Abrahamic view by arguing “if polar bears or pine trees or penguins, like men, are to be regarded as ends rather than means[,] someone must tell me how much each one counts, and some one must tell me how these life-forms are to be permitted to express their preferences, for I do not know either answer” (Satris 1992, 96). Anthropocentrists in the Abrahamic (Locke) and Modern (Descartes) and Neoclassical (Baxter) traditions fail to realize that preference satisfaction is not exclusive to humans. Polar bears, penguins and pine trees have intrinsic value by “preferring” (respectively) salmon to silted rivers, Arctic oceans to tropical oceans, and clean air to car exhaust. Indeed, as Ferré remarks, “Preference need not be conscious, as it is with human beings; preference, positive or negative, may be expressed by engulfing a speck of food, by fleeing from an attacking lion, by buzzing into sweet-smelling blossoms, or even by unfolding leaves and petals toward the sun. Here, at the level of organism, is the behavioral equivalent of value judgments. The organismic world is full of valuers; therefore the world—emphatically including the world outside the human realm—is full of value” (1996, 22). From a nonanthropocentric perspective, the intrinsic value of a biotic community may outweigh its use-value for humans. The instrumental value of something might be enormous to a multitude of low-sentience selves, and subsequently trump the claims of a relatively few higher-sentience selves. The instrumental value of grass in a Great Plains ecological system for native biota such as prairie dogs and bison, and myriad other species that in turn depend upon them, might outweigh its instrumental value for non-native organisms of equal or perhaps greater intrinsic value, such as cattle and humans, that would gain a good deal of satisfaction from eating the grass (cows) or the red meat of the cows (humans) (Ferré 1994, 69). The value of a resource for spotted owls or desert tortoises might exceed the resource’s value for human ends. Thus, nonanthropocentrism may inveigh against human interests. Consider the issue of bushmeat (meat from wildlife). In the Congo Basin, people have been hunting wildlife for forty thousand years (Bahuchert 1993). Bush meat is an important source of protein for humans who live in forest border regions (Bennett and Robinson 2000). Today, the diets of eighty percent of central Africans’ include bushmeat (Pearce 2005). However, according to zoologists, bushmeat hunting has resulted in a precipitous drop in the number of apes (Walsh et al. 2003). Apes are next to humans with regard to intensity of sentience and are thus of high intrinsic value. Yet if current trends continue, bushmeat hunting will likely soon lead to the extinction of many species (Bowen-Jones et al. 2003). According to nonanthropocentrism, the interests of bushmeat species trump the interests of humans, who are not about to go extinct and who can transition to other food sources.

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8.3.3 Nonegalitarianism Not all organisms have equal intrinsic value. An axiology of nonegalitarian valuation posits a hierarchical ordering of value in the natural order. Some beings worthy of moral consideration have, or possess, more intrinsic value than others. On the ontology of organicism, there are gradations of intrinsic value, depending on the intensity or magnitude of subjective experience (Sect. 2.4). Cats show a wider variety of preferences and behaviors than worms, and thus cats have greater intrinsic value than worms. Similarly, humans show a wider range of preferences and behaviors than cats. A nonegalitarian axiology of graded intrinsic and extrinsic values provides the framework for weighing and adjudicating the myriad conflicts of interest of ecological entities. Humans are exceptional in one important way (Sect. 7.4). Nonegalitarianism permits humanism in two ways. First, the expropriation of non-human natural resources for human use is justified, since humans, like any other species of being, may justifiably use nonhuman nature as economic resources as necessitated by living on Earth. Second, human subjectivity provides a benchmark for the measurement of intrinsic value. This sort of anthropocentrism, as a form of human exceptionalism, is rightly called anthropometrism. The ethics of ecology is nonanthropocentric, but also anthropometric—that is, it sets human creativity as the standard or measurement or benchmark for intrinsic value.

8.4 Conclusion Biological nature consists of entities in patterned process. This process is both mechanistic (deterministic) and extra-mechanistic (indeterministic). The products of such process—organisms, species, communities and ecosystems—are beautiful. Aesthetics is the keystone of a total philosophy of ecology. Aesthetic experience of the beauty of nature is essential to ecological understanding. The possibility of ecological justice ultimately rests on the reality of natural beauty.

References Bahuchert, Serge. 1993. History of the Inhabitants of the Central African Rain Forest: Perspectives from Comparative Linguistics. In Tropical Forests, People and Food: Biocultural Interactions and Applications to Development, ed. Claude M. Hladik, A. Hladick, Olga F. Linares, H. Pagezy, 37–54. Pearl River, New York: Parthenon Publishing Group. Bennett, Elizabeth L., and John G. Robinson. 2000. Hunting of Wildlife in Tropical Forests: Implications for Biodiversity and Forest Peoples. Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction/The World Bank.

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Bowen-Jones, Evan, D. Brown, and E. J. Z. Robinson. 2003. Economic Commodity or Environmental Crisis? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Analysing the Bushmeat Trade in Central and West Africa. Area 35 (4) (December): 390–402. Burdick, Alan. 1994. It’s Not the Only Alien Invader. The New York Times Magazine (November 13): 48–55, 78, 80–81, 86–87. Callicott, J. Baird. 1989. In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Callicott, J. Baird. 1999. Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Costanza, Robert, Bryan G. Norton, and Benjamin D. Haskell. 1992. Ecosystem Health: New Goals for Environmental Management. Washington D.C.: Island Press. Craige, Betty Jean. 2001. Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Darwin, Charles. 1981. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Esbjörn-Hargens, Sean, and Michael E. Zimmerman. 2009. Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Boston: Integral Books. Ferré, Frederick. 1988. Philosophy of Technology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Ferré, Frederick. 1996. Persons in Nature: Toward an Applicable and Unified Environmental Ethics. Ethics and the Environment 1 (1): 15–25. Ferré, Frederick. 1994. Personalistic Organicism: Paradox or Paradigm? In Philosophy and the Natural Environment: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 36, ed. Robin Attfield and Andrew Belsey, 59–73. New York: Cambridge University Press. Flader, Susan L., and J. Baird Callicott. 1991. ‘The River of the Mother of God’ and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Gert, Bernard. 2004. Common Morality: Deciding What to Do. New York: Oxford University Press. Gert, Bernard. 2005. Morality: Its Nature and Justification, Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Gert, Bernard. 2010. Hobbes: Prince of Peace. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Heffernan, James D. 1982. The Land Ethic: A Critical Appraisal. Environmental Ethics 4 (3) (Fall): 235–247. Hobbes, Thomas. 1985. Leviathan, ed. C.B. MacPherson. New York: Penguin Books. Homer. The Odyssey. 1996, trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books. Hudson, William (ed.). 1969. The Is-Ought Question. New York: Macmillan. Hume, David. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P.H. Nidditch, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2006. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Eric. 1997. Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Keller, David R. 1997. Gleaning Lessons from Deep Ecology. Ethics and the Environment 2 (2) (Fall): 139–148. Keller, David R. 1998. Ecological Hermeneutics. Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, MA, August 12. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Envi/EnviKell.htm. Accessed 21 August 2011. Keller, David R. 2010. An Introduction to Ethics for Teaching. Teaching Ethics: Journal of the Society of Ethics Across the Curriculum 11 (1) (Fall): 1–52. Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press. Leopold, Aldo. 1946. Erosion As a Menace to the Social and Economic Future of the Southwest. Journal of Forestry 44 (9) (September): 627–633.

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Loope, Lloyd L., Ole Hamman, and Charles P. Stone. 1988. Comparative Conservation Biology of Oceanic Archipelagoes: Hawaii and the Galápagos. BioScience 38 (4) (April): 272–282. McKeon, Richard (ed.). 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. Moore, G.E. 2000 (1903). Principia Ethica. New York: Cambridge University Press. Naess, Arne. 2008. The Shallow and the Deep Ecology Movement, trans. Erling Schøller. In Deep Ecology in Bucharest, ed. Peder Anker. The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 24, no. 1, 59–66. Nielsen, Kai. 1967. Problems of Ethics. In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. Paul Edwards, 117–134. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Paine, R.T. 1980. Food Webs: Linkage, Interaction Strength and Community Infrastructure. Journal of Animal Ecology 49: 666–685. Pearce, Fred. 2005. The Protein Gap. Conservation in Practice 6 (3) (July): 117–123. Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg (ed.). 1980. Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. London: University of California Press. Sandler, Ronald, and Philip Cafaro (eds.). 2005. Environmental Virtue Ethics. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Satris, Stephen (ed.). 1992. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Moral Issues, 3rd ed. Guilford, Connecticut: Dushkin Publishing Group. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd ed. New York: New York Review Books. Singer, Peter. All Animals Are Equal. Philosophical Exchange 1 (5) (Summer 1974): 103–116. Sinnott-Armstrong, William, and Robert Audi. 2002. Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Smith, Adam. 2009. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin. Stone, Charles P., and J.O. Keith. 1987. Control of Feral Ungulates and Small Mammals in Hawaii National Parks: Research and Management Strategies. In Control of Mammal Pests, ed. C.G.J. Richards and T.Y. Ku, 277–279. New York: Taylor & Francis. Taylor, Paul W. 1986. Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Walsh, Peter D., Kate A. Abernethy, Magdalena Bermejo, Rene Beyersk, Pauwel De Wachter, Marc Ella Akou, Bas Huijbregts, Daniel Idiata Mambounga, Andre Kamdem Toham, Annelisa M. Kilbournk, Sally A. Lahmq, Stefanie Latourk, Fiona Maiselsk, Christian Mbinak, Yves Mihindouk, Sosthène Ndong Obiang, Ernestine Ntsame Effa, Malcolm P. Starkeyk, Paul Telfer, Marc Thibault, Caroline E. G. Tutin, Lee J. T. Whitek, and David S. Wilkie. 2003. Catastrophic Ape Decline in Western Equatorial Africa. Nature 422 (April 10): 611–614. Wilson, Edward O. 1980. Sociobiology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Chapter 9

Political Economy of Ecology

Abstract The productive activities that constitute our material existence create the possibility of culture. Morality, custom, law, science and religion have an economic base and can be largely explained in terms of features of the base. Further, no economic system exists without an ecological foundation: the productive activities that constitute our material existence in turn depend upon an environmental matrix. Economic activity is a social function, thus political life and economic life are intertwined to form a political economy. Two alternative forms of industrial political economy are possible, conforming to two different models: (1) the Expansionary Model and (2) the Stationary-State Model. Because it requires perpetual growth, the Expansionary Model inherently contradicts the practical finitude of nature, and so does violence to nature, thereby also producing social injustice, especially to future generations of citizens. By contrast, the Stationary-State Model recognizes the practical finitude of nature and respects the value of the whole and its parts. This model maintains the functional integrity of biotic systems by respecting the fact that the economy is inescapably rooted in ecological reality and by recognizing the full array of values—both economic and non-economic—that are present. Further, it can accommodate a form of “no-diseconomy capitalism,” in which public policy prevents the acquisition of profit by externalizing the costs of production—costs that would be unjustly borne by the least wealthy and powerful citizens. Therefore, it is the only model that can support a healthy biosphere and social justice.

No human society exists without an economic foundation. The productive activities that constitute our material existence create the possibility of culture. This means that social structures such as morality, custom, law, and religion have an economic base.1 1 The

notion that that all social institutions, or “superstructures” (custom, law, religion, etc.) derive from basic economic “substructures” (the productive relationships between people and social institutions) is Marxian. As Frederick Engels said at Marx’s graveside: “…mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence…form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas of religion…have been evolved[,] instead of vice versa” (1989, 467–68). Engels reiterated the same point eleven years later in Anti-Dühring: “…men, consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas…from the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 D. R. Keller, Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities, Studies in Global Justice 19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_9

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Further, no economic system exists without an ecological foundation: the productive activities that constitute our material existence depend upon an environmental matrix. An economy is the interface between a human social system and the biosphere. An economy can be thought of as the way Homo sapiens establishes a biological niche. All organisms expropriate resources from their environment. With humans, though, modern day economic activity is a highly structured social function. The social systems that frame economic activity tend to be structured to be of particular benefit to persons of power (Foucault 1980, 131). This makes political life and economic life intertwined (Rothschild and Sen 2006, 319). The integration of political systems and economic systems is therefore properly called the political economy.2 Political economies are capable of undermining themselves by destroying the ecological contexts that support them. Some pre-industrial ancient civilizations collapsed because natural resource extraction exceeded the capacity of the environment for self-renewal—the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island are a notable case (Diamond 2005b, 79–119).3 It is possible, perhaps even probable, that the massive impacts of modern industrial political economy will end in a similar result (Diamond 2005a). The political economies of early human cultures were hunter-gatherer and subsistence agriculture. The dominant political economy now is industrialism, which is based on the expropriation of vast quantities of natural resources, intensive and extensive modification of the land, waters and biota, introduction of huge amounts of synthetic chemicals, such as fertilizers, plastics and pesticides, into the environment, and the injection of vast quantities of waste, much of it toxic, into the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere.4

practical relations in which they carry on production and exchange” (Marx and Engels 1987, 87). Thus, if we want to improve our ecological relationships with the biosphere, we need to first secure a sound political economy. See also Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1980, 31–49). 2 “Political economy” is favorable over “economics” for this reason: A gloss of the literature reveals that mainstream economists think of economics as the study of scarce resource allocation by the choices of rational individuals. In contrast, in the nineteenth-century economics was understood as the study of the creation of wealth and the political structures that made economic activity possible. Since all economic activity presupposes a social structure, the term “political economy” is more accurate. 3 Diamond’s interpretation is not without controversy. See Bloch (2012). 4 Each of these deserves elaboration. Consider for a moment only the second: the intensive modification of the land. The industrialization of the Mississippi River Basin has resulted in radical physical changes to the riparian zone. In order to create economically productive land along the floodplain, the river has been diked and channelized. The result of this artificial intervention is creation of some of the most fertile farmland on Earth, which is good for agriculture, but at the cost of destroying crucial riparian functions. The wetlands of the Mississippi River ecological system function to store floodwaters and modify storm flows, recharge and discharge groundwater, affect evaporation and precipitation patterns, maintain water quality by filtration, and prohibit erosion (Carter 1997). As evidenced in flood stage, channelization of the river also increases output and thereby pressure downstream. In order to facilitate shipping, the river, channelized at its delta in Louisiana, is forced to flow the longest route to the sea, past New Orleans, rather than constantly changing its route and creating a natural delta.

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Two alternative forms of industrial political economy are to be considered: (1) Expansionary political economy (EE) and (2) Stationary-State political economy (SSE). However, the expansionary model is inconsistent with the structure and function of biotic communities, while the stationary-state model is consistent with the structure and function of biotic communities. This provides a framework for the explication of (3) No-Diseconomy Capitalism. No-Diseconomy Capitalism is a type of stationary state economy. It features regulated laissez-faire market mechanisms that operate within boundary conditions set by government.

9.1 Industrial Political Economy: The Expansionary Model The political economy developed after the Industrial Revolution is based on a (1) Principle of perpetual growth and (the Growth Paradigm), and (2) the Abrahamic view of nature, wherein nature is regarded primarily as a variety of resources for human use. Both are flawed.

9.1.1 The Growth Paradigm The perpetual growth model is epitomized by the laissez-faire political economy described by the great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith described a continually growing economy based on increasing levels of population, consumption, and production, all fueled by natural resource utilization. The connection between population, consumption, and production must be understood in the context of the European Enlightenment. Some Enlightenment thinkers espoused the view that reality is purposively ordered ala The Great Chain of Being (Sect. 2.1), and that human reason can apprehend this purpose. The fundamental proposition of this worldview is that autonomous and rational agents engage in financial transactions that are mutually beneficial. Smith believed that an economic system based on this idea will be consonant with the cosmic order. Smith argued that a nation’s wealth is created by cyclical interaction between the labor of an increasing population, its rate of consumption, and its production. On this model, human population growth increases the demand for products, which in turn stimulates manufacturing, thus creating a need for more laborers. Wages enable laborers to raise families, which in turn stimulates demand for products. Smith writes: The liberal reward of labor, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits. It deserves to be remarked too, that it necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion that the demand for labour requires. If this demand is continually increasing, the reward of labour must necessarily encourage in such a manner the marriage and multiplication of laborers, as may enable them to supply that continually increasing demand by a continually

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Fig. 9.1 Tornado economics (Keller 2005a, b)

increasing population[.] It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men (1998, 80).

Smith concludes: “The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity” (idem, 81). Thus, according to Adam Smith increasing population [P] results in increasing demand for products [D] and their consumption, which in turn stimulates manufacturing [M], or production (Fig. 9.1). Once a business owner turns a profit, he or she will hire more employees (idem, 69). As time [T] goes on (the vertical axis), economic output increases, from [1] to [2] to [3]. The engine of this ongoing cycle is fueled by the use of natural resources. When the economy is relatively small [1], less in the way of natural resources is required to fuel the engine, but as the economy grows, so must natural resource expropriation and consumption. The very people who stimulate the process are ready to fill the needed jobs to complete the self-propagating cycle. The structured order of the cosmos thus supports a virtuous cycle of growing human population, increasing consumption, escalating production, and, taken as a whole, an expanding economy. One can appreciate why Smith thought it was reasonable to argue for an expansionary laissez-faire political economy. From the perspective of eighteenth-century Scotland, he knew that the world was not literally infinite, but the natural resources needed to fuel this ever-expanding cycle of production appeared functionally infinite. Imagine how the reports of the vast landscapes of North America must have appeared to an eighteenth-century Scot, sitting on a large island bounded by sea,

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reading descriptions of unbroken deciduous forest from the Atlantic coast to the Great Plains. The scale must have seemed so large as to make natural resources seem virtually inexhaustible. The environment appeared as a mere background condition for industrial economy but did not itself factor into economic considerations. Obviously, the earth and its natural resources are quantitatively finite. But Adam Smith’s idea of perpetual economic growth based on increasing population growth, natural resource expropriation, and production, has been vigorously defended by twentieth century thinkers who believed that harmonization of perpetual population expansion with perpetual natural resource expropriation is facilitated by perpetual technological advancement. They argue that there is no known limit to resources for production because some resources can be recycled and others can be replaced by newly developed ones. In 1963, economists Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse (1963) demonstrated that from 1870 to 1957, prices for natural resources decreased, reflecting decreased scarcity by advances in natural resource extraction. In 1965, Danish social scientist Ester Boserup concluded from a study of the history of agriculture, that increasing population density requires utilizing fallow or marginal land through intensive farming techniques such as irrigation and fertilizer (1965, 64). Technological changes, in turn, allow for increasing population levels, which in turn motivates further innovation. “Other areas would have little or no technological change because of stagnant populations, and would continue to have stagnant populations because of no technological change” (1981, 5). A 1976 article argued that some elements, such as aluminum and iron, are “practically inexhaustible” due to recyclability (Goeller and Weinberg 1976, 683), and other elements, such as mercury, are substitutable by other materials (idem, 685). American economist Julian Simon (1932–1998) maintained that technological innovation enables perpetual resource expropriation in a self-perpetuating virtuous cycle (1981, 62–67). He argued that, from an economic point of view, the notion of limited natural resources is false: certain natural resources might be limited, but substitutes for them are not (1996, 62–66). As a specific natural resource becomes scarce, the motivation to find a replacement for it through some kind of technological innovation is heightened: “…the more people there are, the more minds that are working to discover new sources, and increase productivity, with raw materials as with all other goods” (idem, 407–08). Methodological advances in the technology of the natural resource extraction will continue, as well as ongoing substitution of resources. For instance, copper used to make wire for telephone lines is finite, but fiber optic cable is replacing copper. Therefore, natural resources are functionally inexhaustible thanks to technology, and pose no limit on economic growth. “Hence, resources are not finite in any meaningful sense” (idem, 64). For Simon, the expansionary industrial political economy is a virtuous cycle of perpetual economic growth made possible through a self-powered mechanism of increasing population, consumption, technological progress, industrialization, producing further population growth, ad infinitum. Western consumer culture is the pinnacle achievement of growth political economy. The greater the scale of consumption, the more productive the economy, thanks to the prospect of unlimited technological advancement.

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Unfortunately, despite Simon’s ingenuity, the principle of perpetual growth is false. The virtuous cycle of limitless growth is physically impossible because natural resources are in fact finite, so that given perpetual growth, at some point the human population will become so large that no possible amount of recycling and chemical or engineering wizardry will be able to support it. Technological advances might prolong economic prosperity for a stable population, but at some point the human population will become so large that it simply cannot be supported. Simon dodges this point by drawing an analogy between mathematical infinity and natural resource inexhaustibility: just as the number of points along a one-inch line is not finite, nor are the number of substitutes for copper (1981, 47). But the asymptotic infinity of an infinitely divisible line of finite length is disanalogous to physical infinity (Daly 1982, 39). As a practical matter, there is no such thing as infinity of physical resources. We may not know the practical limit to their quantity and availability, but in the absence of any reason to believe otherwise, it is reasonable to suppose that there is a limit. Simon’s claim that resources are not finite in any meaningful sense is clearly false. It expresses wishful thinking but cannot support a sound economic theory. The finitude of Earth is one of the most compelling messages of the famed Apollo imagery: the living ecological systems of Earth are bounded, absolutely and definitively, by cold, dark, lifeless space. Since the natural resources of Earth are limited, the material for an ongoing expansionary political economy would only be available through extra-terrestrial natural resource exploitation—something that is not obviously feasible. In any case, the brute fact is that there are no substitutes for some natural resources: clean air and water are the most obvious. As the human population grows and development continues in the desert Southwest of the United States, for example, what will be the substitute for scarce water? For clean air? The average flow of the Colorado River, which provides water to seven states, has been overallocated since the “Compact of the River” in 1922, when its average flow was overestimated by several hundred million acre-feet. Since then, demand has grown while the flow has actually begun to decline with global warming. Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are drying up. At the same time, other sources (e.g., aquifers) are also becoming depleted. Sea water can be desalinated, but only at great cost. To say the least, it is unrealistic to believe that we can keep going this way (increasing demand + reduced availability) forever. Some philosophers of perpetual growth redundant augment the first argument with an additional premise. The premise is that perpetually increasing population levels will produce more smart persons who will figure out new and novel ways of mitigating the human economic impact on the biosphere through improved technology. Even supposing that average human intelligence does not increase, Boserup (1965, 1981) maintains that the more people, the more innovation. However, while the equation “more people  more innovation” might be true, it might also be false. This is a strong empirical claim lacking substantial support. Indeed, a small group of creative people feeding off each other’s ideas and energy might be more creative than a larger group. It is no surprise that some of the most innovative individuals were part of small, creative communities. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle formed one of the greatest teacher-student/teacher-student relationships in history. Writers

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living in Paris during the 1920s (Beckett, Joyce, Hemmingway, Eliot, Stein, Faulkner, to name a few) regularly exchanged ideas at cafés along the Seine and gave the twentieth-century some of its greatest literature. Similarly, the Beat Generation writers (Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs) were friends and shared ideas. Bell Laboratories—certainly one of the most innovative companies in U.S. history—was intentionally designed so engineers would walk along a long hallway, meet colleagues, and discuss research (Gertner 2012). Creativity is a function of the quality of individuals, not quantity. In any case, the addition of this new premise, even if we assume it to be true, does nothing to overcome the brute fact of practical finitude of resources. There is clearly no necessary connection between growing human populations and increasing innovation or creativity, and no very good reason for thinking that there is any relationship between the two at all. The possibility of perpetual growth is more fantasy.

9.1.2 The Abrahamic View of Nature (Resourcism) The Abrahamic view of nature is a resource axiology. According to the view stated in Genesis 1.28–30, natural resources are for human use. The economic instrumentalism of Abrahamism assigns extrinsic value—and only extrinsic value—to nonhuman nature (Sects. 2.1, 3.2 and 8.3). The sole value of nonhuman nature is instrumental. In classical economics, Abrahamism is elaborated in terms of the (a) Labor Theory of Value; and in Neoclassical economics as (b) Hedonistic Egoism.5

9.1.2.1

Labor Theory of Value

The labor theory of value has its roots in the philosophy of John Locke. It was originally formulated by Adam Smith and subsequently elaborated by David Ricardo. It is also found in the work of Karl Marx. The theory posits three necessary conditions for the production of economic value: land, labor, and capital. It is the second necessary condition—labor—that is the primary source of economic value on this theory. On the topic of the market valuation of natural resources, such as agro-ecological systems, Locke wrote: “…labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things, we enjoy in this World: And the ground which produces the materials, is scarce to be reckon’d in, as any, or at most, but a very small, part of it” (2005, 297). On the same 5 Early

liberal political economy is known as Classical economics. Classical economics locates the source of value in human labor (The Labor Theory of Value). The theory that replaced the Classical school is known as Neoclassical economics—a phrase coined by Thorstein Veblen (1900, 265). Neoclassical economics locates the source of value in the preference satisfaction of prudent agents (Hedonistic Egoism). I categorize Classical and Neoclassical theories as instances of Growth Political Economy. This includes the libertarianism of the Austrian (Menger 1976; Hayek 1948) and Chicago (Friedman 1962) schools of economics that advocate decentralization, deregulation, privatization of property, and limited government.

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topic, Marx wrote: “uncultivated land…is without value because no human labour is objectified in it” (1990, 197). In the Wealth of Nations, Smith illustrates the labor theory of value with the example of hunting in a pre-civilized state of nature: In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects, seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver than it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer. It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days or two hours labour, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day’s or one hour’s labour (1998, 45).

According to market principles, if it takes one day to kill a deer and two days to kill another species of animal of equal utility, then the market price of one beaver will be double that of one deer. Because natural resources in this hypothetical state of nature are superabundant, the locus of the creation of value is labor. This, of course, totally ignores the fact that a deer and the alternative animal (e.g., a javelina) may not be of equivalent utility or value to the consumers of them. By analogy, it might take a lot more skill and effort for a mountain lion to stalk and kill a Rocky Mountain billy goat than to stalk and kill a cow elk, and might entail greater danger, but the greater reward for the mountain lion and its growing kittens will be the elk because it is larger and provides more nutrition. There is no reason why the world should revolve around the human species any differently, rewarding endeavor in this way. The value of land is a function of its demand in the market, which ultimately depends upon labor. It has no market value in and of itself. According to market principles, a superabundance of land reduces its share of market price to an almost negligible amount. Once land is privatized for economic gain, however, it begins to have a cost in the market price of agricultural goods; and land closer to markets incurs a higher cost (rent) than land farther away, due to the closer lands’ lower transportation costs (Sagoff 2005, 3). Ceteris paribus, the value of land is proportional to its distance from markets. And similarly, for variations in the productivity of plots of land. But without human labor, there would no products to sell. Thus, it is labor, not land that is the ultimate source of economic value. Unfortunately, this simplistic labor theory of value is false. To see why, think of twin brothers who are both farmers and have a similar capacity for strenuous labor.6 If both exert the same effort to produce corn, then on this theory the market price of their corn crop should be the same. But imagine that one brother is farming marginal land in Nevada, and the other brother is farming fertile land in Indiana. Omitting the introduction of technology (capital), the exertions of the Nevada brother will yield less corn than the exertions of the Indiana brother. But on the simple labor theory of value, the value of the corn that each man produces will be equal to the amount of labor required to produce it, which we are assuming to be equal. Owing to different growing conditions, the Nevada man will have produced less corn than his Indiana 6 This

illustration is adapted from Samuelson (1967, 614).

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brother, in which case the price of an ear of Nevada corn should be higher than the price of an ear of Indiana corn. The ears of corn may be identical in every respect, but the one grown in Nevada will be worth more than the one grown in Indiana, just because it was grown in Nevada. Refinements to the theory can solve this problem. For example, we might think of the value of land in terms of fecundity. Agricultural land in Indiana is more valuable (commands higher rent) than agricultural land in Nevada because it is more productive. Consequently, the cost of producing corn is higher in Indiana than Nevada. But on the free market their price will be similar. The Nevada brother brings less corn to the market than the Indiana brother, but since his costs are lower his income might be on par with that of his Indiana brother. However, we can and do also value land for its nonconsumptive, noneconomic values, choosing therefore not to exploit it for its natural resources or agricultural fecundity. Consider the phenomenon of ecotourism. The labor theory of value does not take adequate account of market demand and is incapable of explaining why some land is economically valuable for its very lack of development—as evidenced in the phenomenon of ecotourism. Ecotourism is an economy based on the consumer demand of adventure travelers for remote and pristine areas to visit and explore. Accordingly, the primary value of land in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica is the fact that it is uncultivated. Similarly, the vast canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau. Contrary to the claims of Locke and Marx, undeveloped land may well have market value—market value that might exceed its value if it is developed. American wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold contrasted the Abrahamic conception of land, which sees land as resources for the production of commodities, with the idea of land as a community of life (Leopold 1949, viii). This is a shift from an anthropocentric view of land to an ecocentric view of land. For Leopold, the major obstacle to achieving an ecocentric ethic is the resource axiology (Sects. 2.1, 3.2, 8.3). Currently our relations with the land are guided only by human economic interest. The problem with Abrahamism is that it is incapable of recognizing ecological types of value, which are not amenable to commodification: “a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning” (Leopold 1949, 214). The resource axiology tends automatically towards management of land in an attempt to remove what are regarded as its economically negative aspects while at the same time enhancing what are regarded as its economically positive aspects. An extreme case is the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon Rain Forest and destruction of its biota, to be replaced with domestic crops and livestock. Another example is the ongoing efforts of state and provincial wildlife management agencies in the western United States and Canada to artificially boost the number of big game ungulates (e.g., elk and bighorn sheep) by in part artificially reducing the number of large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions, bears) that prey upon them. This artificial selection does not mimic natural selection and can seriously disrupt the flow of energy through the trophic levels of the ecosystem in ways that reduce biodiversity (Terborgh 2004). In the course of time, many species that have no utility or immediate economic value,

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might well disappear, causing not only a net loss of biodiversity, but reducing the resiliency of ecosystems and their capacity to provide services of value to human beings, such as plentiful, clean water (idem, 47). Leopold argued that this cleavage between “Abrahamism” and “Ecocentrism” is noticeable throughout the disciplines that deal with the land—forestry, wildlife biology, and agriculture. Leopold observed that “Conservationists are notorious for their dissensions. Superficially, these seem to add up to mere confusion, but a more careful scrutiny reveals a single plane of cleavage common to many specialized fields. In each field one group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader” (idem, 221). On the resource model (A), the value of the land is extrinsic to it (vide Sect. 2.1). Humans should “release” as much value from the land as possible through resource extraction. On the ecocentric model (B), the land is a living community with value above and beyond resource value. Leopold’s example was the biota of Wisconsin: “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5% can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the ecological community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance” (1949, 210). The Land Pyramid (Fig. 3.2) depicts biota with ecological value independent of resource value. The problem with the commodity model of value is that it does not recognize ecological value, and so decisions are made with an eye to making a profit even though those actions degrade the integrity, stability and resiliency of biological communities, thus destroying their intrinsic value. For Leopold, this is unconscionable public policy: “economic provocation is no longer a satisfactory excuse for unsocial land-use, or, to use somewhat stronger words, for ecological atrocities” (1948). For sound environmental policy, “the ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem” (1949, 224). Some members of the ecological community may have great value by virtue of contributing greatly to ecosystemic integrity, stability and resiliency, yet have no monetary value. Marshland, for example, commands very little value on the real estate market unless it is drained and dredged and developed for commercial uses. But the ecological value of undeveloped marshland is significant nonetheless. The wetlands of the Mississippi River function to store floodwaters and modify storm flows, recharge and discharge groundwater, affect evaporation and precipitation patterns, maintain water quality by filtration, and prohibit erosion (Carter 1997). Channelizing the river with dikes and levees destroys these crucial riparian functions, although it creates productive farmland. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Louisiana coast on August 29, 2005, demonstrated the crucial function that estuaries have in coastal ecological systems, and the negative effects of the destruction of estuarine marshlands (Tibbetts 2006, A42). The labor theory of value fails to take such things into account and consequently fails as an axiology applicable to ecological communities.

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Hedonistic Egoism

In contrast to the objectivist axiology of the labor theory of value of classical economics, the axiological foundation of neoclassical economics is subjectivist: humans are rational agents who make prudent decisions to achieve egocentric ends. Hedonistic egoism is the basis of the conception of the human being as the rational economic animal, Homo economicus. According to this view, economic value is a behavioral function of human preference satisfaction. Human preference satisfaction drives the economic transactions of voluntary agents in a marketplace. These agents are taken to follow axioms of rational choice that can be quantitatively measured by the price of the commodities traded. This makes neoclassical theory at once hedonistic and quantitative: hedonistic because value is dependent upon human preference (Cooter and Rappoport 1984), and quantitative because value can be measured by market price (Edwards 1986). The quantification of market price is appealing to economists who want the discipline to yield apodictive assessments of value regardless of how well they capture reality. The hedonistic egoism of neoclassical economics is an elaboration of the labor theory of value. It may be superior in certain respects to the simplistic theory of labor, but it too fails. According to hedonistic egoism, the economic value of natural resources can be quantitatively measured by the choices of prudent agents in a marketplace (Bromley and Paavola 2002, 264). Nevertheless, this type of theory fails to provide an adequate axiology for the valuation of ecological systems. In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that the breadth of motivations for human choice is much broader and deeper than the use-value commodities have for human preference satisfaction. Why? Satisfaction of preference does not necessarily lead to satisfaction in the sense of contentment, or eudaemonia (Sect. 8.2). Persons do things that may not lead to individual pleasure but for other non-egoistic reasons. Suppose there is a town, formerly rural, that has become exurbia for a large metropolitan area. A century ago, an irrigation company was incorporated to meet the water demands of farmers and poultry producers, and this company owned an undeveloped hundred-acre tract of forested canyon that served as watershed for agricultural irrigation. Since domestic water demand is only a fraction of agricultural water demand, the transition from farm town to commuter community has abrogated the need for agricultural water, and consequently the irrigation company is interested in selling the parcel. The town council approves a ballot referendum: allow the irrigation company to sell the hundred-acre tract to a wealthy developer or authorize the municipality to issue general obligation 15-year bonds to fund the purchase of the land for a public nature preserve. If the land is sold to the developer, the area will be subdivided into one hundred one-acre parcels for expensive custom homes and the town will reap large tax dividends, which could be used for a new school, fire station, and library. Most significantly, the town’s appeal as an affluent enclave will be secured, and total property values would increase. If the land is sold to the town, the finances of the town will remain static and home-value appreciation modest, but the ecological integrity of the canyon riparian zone would be maintained. Many citizens might prefer being able to walk quietly in the canyon in a reflective mood, observing wild

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animals, the foliage, and simply enjoying the quiet and solitude. These are not market commodities, but natural amenities that people might prefer to an exclusive housing development despite the benefits it might bring. Hedonistic egoism provides an intelligible explanation of people’s motivations for voting to sell the land to the developer. However, the explanation fails when it comes to explaining the motivations of people who vote for the preserve. A mother may want her children to grow up knowing and loving the natural heritage of the place. Many citizens might prefer being able to walk quietly in the canyon in a reflective mood, observing wild animals, the foliage, the fish in the stream, and simply enjoying the quiet and solitude. These goods, including the animals and plants and the natural environment that provides what is good for them, are not market commodities, but natural amenities that people might prefer to an exclusive housing development despite the benefits it would bring. The motivation to opt for them is surely not entirely hedonistic, nor does it seem particularly egoistic. There are elements of altruism and ecophilia present, which concern the good of beings other than oneself. If acting out of this kind of concern benefits oneself too, that is something secondary. This shows that the explanation of hedonistic egoism for citizen choice on the ballot referendum is far too thin to make sense of the wide range of human motivations for valuing ecological systems. By focusing only on market price, the hedonistic egoism of neoclassical economics underestimates the total environmental costs and benefits in the context of sound public policy (Gregory and McDaniels 1987, 24). Therefore, an economic axiology of public goods—such as ecological systems—which does not take into account moral and aesthetic satisfaction, is inadequate (Kahneman and Knetsch 1992, 69). Public policy process. The explanatory superficiality of hedonistic egoism reveals that the neoclassical model is inadequate to meet the standards of a robust conception of human motivation and therefore fails as an axiology for political economy. This is the basis of Amartya Sen’s (1977) celebrated critique of hedonistic egoism. Sen characterizes the “rational” actor of hedonistic egoism as an agent of preference satisfaction. This agent shows no inconsistencies or anomalies in behavior because all motivations for economic activity have a rank in a hierarchical ordering of preference. Yet, as Sen says, this “rational agent” is more of a fool, even if a “rational fool.” Sen points out that humans, as social beings, have a variety of motivations, not merely egoistic ones. These other motivations, which are excluded from the neoclassical calculus, include sympathy and altruism. For example, the sentiment of sympathy might be consistent with hedonistic egoism (idem, 328), whereas the sentiment of altruism might be inconsistent with hedonistic egoism (idem, 329). These various motivations, taken together, are bound to reveal inconsistencies in alternate rankings of preferences. Sen says: “A person…may be ‘rational’ in the limited sense of revealing no inconsistencies in his choice behavior, but if he has no use for these distinctions between quite different concepts, he must be a bit of a fool. The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool decked in the glory of his one all-purpose

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preference ordering” (idem, 336).7 Hedonistic egoism conceives of human beings as economic actors and economic actors only (Homo economicus). Even if the hedonistic formulation of rationality were plausible, there are still good reasons to believe that environmental public policy should not be based on preference satisfaction anyway. American legal scholar Cass Sunstein identifies a category of preferences that are contingent upon external or environment circumstances. He calls these contingent preferences “endogenous preferences” (1991) which “range from whimsy to considered judgment” (idem, 7n). These “preferences are not fixed and stable, but are instead adaptive to a wide range of factors—including the context in which the preference is expressed, the existing legal rules, past consumption choices, and culture in general. The phenomenon of endogenous preferences casts doubt on the notion that a democratic government ought to respect private desires and beliefs in all or almost all contexts” (idem, 5). That individuals express a preference for consumer products does not entail the conclusion that environmental public policy should be framed to promote consumerism. Taken together, the flaws of the Principle of Perpetual Growth and Abrahamism render Expansionary political economy unsound and inadequate (Partridge 1998, 266). It is time to consider it’s opposite—a non-expansionary political economy.

9.2 Industrial Political Economy: The Stationary-State Model Alongside the dominant tradition of growth political economy is a vibrant minority tradition: Steady—or Stationary-State political economy.8 The fundamental assumption of Stationary-State political economy is that economic activity must be concordant with the structure and function of the biotic communities that sustain economic activity. Stationary-State political economy has been elaborated by (1) English philosopher John Stuart Mill and (2) American economist Herman Daly.

7 The

hedonistic egoism rejected by Sen was mocked memorably by Veblen, who compared the notion of the rational hedonist with “lightning calculators”—individuals endowed with a preternatural ability for making mathematical computations at amazing speed without the aid of instruments (Smith 1983): “The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down upon him, where-upon he follows the line of the resultant. When the force of the impact is spent, he comes to rest, a self-contained globule of desire as before. Spiritually, the hedonistic man is not a prime mover. He is not the seat of a process of living, except in the sense that he is subject to a series of permutations enforced upon him by circumstances external and alien to him” (1898, 389–90). 8 As noted by Daly, “stationary-state” is more common in economics and demography, while “steady-state” is more common in the physical sciences (Daly and Townsend 1993, 24).

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9.2.1 John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an early proponent of stationary-state political economy. Like his predecessors (David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo) Mill addressed the issue of growth, but came to a very different conclusion than they did; a Stationary-State economy is not only possible, Mill argued, it is morally desirable. In Principles of Political Economy Mill writes: “I cannot…regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by the political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels…are the most desirable lot of human kind” (1965, 753–54). Mill arrived at this conclusion from the observation that in a society constituted by laborers, landlords, and capitalists, an increase in population ultimately benefits only the landlord class through increasing rents (idem, 731–32). As population increases, per capita income declines. Thus, as historian of economics Samuel Hollander writes, the “essence of Mill’s perspective…is that whether or not capital is growing, and at whatever rate, living standards of the masses will be high or low depending upon the relative growth of population; low standards were thus compatible with (aggregate) expansion, high standards were compatible with stationarity” (1985, 886). With respect to the majority of citizens, stationarity “becomes the means to the end of high per capita earnings rather than an end itself” (idem, 887). Mill argued that a more desirable situation is one in which population remains static. Mill’s conception of a stationary-state political economy does not imply, however, that there can be no improvements in the standard of living and the human condition in general: “It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement” (1965, 756). Technological advancements increase per capita income, as well as improvements in art, justice, and other social objectives. This last point alludes to noneconomic aesthetic and psychological benefits (cf. Arcadianism Sect. 2.1) of a Stationary-State political economy: There is room in the world, no doubt…for a great increase of population[.] But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for it[.] It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude…is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture (ibid.).

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These remarks make Mill “the first major environmentalist” (Rostow 1990, 117). Mill was not just concerned with what will happen, but, given favorable conditions and a strong collective will, what can happen (Hollander 2000, 223).

9.2.2 Herman Daly Herman Daly finds Mill “even more relevant today than in his own time” (Daly and Townsend 1993, 28). For Daly, stationary-state economics is the attempt to give concreteness to the general notion of “sustainability” or “sustainable development” (Daly 2003).9 Daly and fellow economist Kenneth Townsend argue that economics involves three independent factors: allocation, distribution, and scale. Allocation is the relative division of limited resources (how much goes to the production of guns or butter); distribution is the relative division of resources between individuals; and scale is the physical magnitude of matter-energy drawn from the environment and 9 In popular discourse, “sustainability” can mean three things. First, sustainability can be thought of

in terms of a single natural resource, for example, wood products from trees. Sustainable lumbering, in this sense, refers to harvesting timber at or below the rate in which tree plantations can produce a given level of wood products on an ongoing basis. On this definition, clear-cutting would likely be allowed, as long as the rate of timber extraction in a certain area does not exceed the growth rate of trees in that area. Second, sustainability can be thought of in terms ecology. In a forest ecosystem, (which is a far more complex ecosystem than a tree plantation) trees fall, rot, return nutrients to the soil, and create depressions, which collect water and form habitats for microorganisms. On this definition, the goal would be to allow a complex eco-system to continue to reproduce itself, as opposed to focusing on the production of a commodity such as wood fiber. In some cases, appropriating resources would be prohibited as resource extraction of any kind would impede the ability of the forest eco-system to reproduce itself. In other cases, sustainable logging would involve the selective cutting of trees at or below the rate in which younger trees reach maturity, and leaving enough trees to die, fall, and decay in order to maintain the integrity of the overall ecological system. This second definition, of course, says nothing about the fact that the demand for timber likely exceeds the ability for forest ecosystems to replenish themselves. Third, the issue of consumer demand for natural resources points to a more inclusive definition of sustainability which pays attention to the politics behind economic forces: if the demand for timber exceeds the ecological requirements of sustainability, then people should live in smaller houses, or use alternative materials (galvanized steel, for example, is being used in tropical climates to avoid termite infestation). The influential 1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report, chaired by Norwegian stateswoman Gro Brundtland, focuses on the social ramifications of economic activity: “The concept of sustainable development does imply limits—not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities[.] Sustainable global development requires that those who are more affluent adopt lifestyles within the planet’s ecological means[.] Further, rapidly growing populations can increase the pressure on resources and slow any rise in living standards; thus sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem” (loc. cit., 8, 9). This definition of sustainability implicitly involves both the relationships between affluent and poor nations and relationships between the wealthy and poor within nations. Additionally, it also involves the relationships between generations. Philosopher Newton (2003, 1) brings this latter relationship to the fore when she invokes the Native American mandate that the

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returned to the environment via the marketplace (loc. cit., 2). “A good [magnitude] in one that is at least sustainable, that does not erode environmental carrying capacity over time” (ibid.). The expansionary model emphasizes the first two factors at the expense of the third. According to Daly, the expansionary model ignores the issue of magnitude of economic activity. In error, expansionary political economy treats natural resources and sinks as functionally inexhaustible (1991, 2–3). (This has been the case for both communist and capitalist political economies (idem, 7).10 In contrast, on the stationary-state model “the ecosystem contains the economy” (idem, 3).11 Industrial processes and manufactured commodities exist only within the framework of the larger natural system of the biosphere (Daly 1991, 15). Commodities and people both require maintenance (ibid.). Maintenance requires a throughput coming from and returning to the biosphere. Input consists of low-entropy resources, and output consists of high-entropy waste (pollution). Throughput is characterized by two magnitudes: (1) the size, or stock of the throughput (commodities and people), and (2) the durability of commodities, which determines the rate of the throughput. The pool of natural resources from which and to which the throughput originates and returns is finite. Contrary to the growth model of Boserup and Simon, who do not recognize limit, stationary-state economics recognizes the scarcity of natural resources as an inescapable problem (Daly and Townsend 1993, 21, 19). As low entropy resources are converted into high-entropy waste, the pool of usable lowentropy natural resources is constantly diminishing. Recycling can slow throughput, but cannot eliminate it. In direct opposition to the orthodoxy of everlasting growth, stationary-state economics holds that the two magnitudes of commodities and people should be kept as constant as possible: “By steady state is meant a constant stock of physical wealth (capital), and a constant stock of people (population). Naturally, these stocks do not remain constant by themselves. People die, and wealth is physically consumed, that is, worn out, depreciated. Therefore, the stocks must be maintained by a rate of inflow (birth, production), equal to the rate of outflow (death, consumption)” (idem, 29). Magnitude of throughput can be maintained in equilibrium given the right input of raw materials. Given scarcity, the throughput should be held as low as possible: “lower rates of throughput lead to less depletion and pollution, higher rates to more. use of scarce resources should be gauged from the perspective of those living seven generations from the present. 10 The industrial growth model can be supported by either a laissez-faire or centralized political economy. A communist political economy could be based in the growth model. Alesksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in a Cold War era plea to Soviet leaders: “Society must cease to look upon ‘progress’ as something desirable. ‘Eternal progress’ is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a ‘steadily expanding economy,’ but a zero-growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only necessary but ruinous. We must set ourselves the aim not of increasing national resources, but merely of conserving them” (1974, 21–22). 11 Hawken et al. (1999, 7) make the same point: “all economic activity…is embedded within the workings of a particular planet.”.

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The limits regarding what rates of depletion and pollution are tolerable must be supplied by ecology” (ibid.). Thus, stationary-state economics diverges from the growth paradigm by asserting (1) that the stock of people and artifacts should be held constant, and (2) that the “physical flows of production and consumption must be minimized, not maximized, subject to some desirable population and standard of living” (idem, 34). As a physical concept (Daly 1991, 17), stationary-state economics does not hold that the human condition cannot improve. À la Mill, technological advances will increase the standard of living, and refinements in religion, art, and ethics will advance culture with minimum throughput (idem, 16–17). Stationary-state political economy assumes a static human population size. Religion and socially-constructed mores (Sect. 6.2) aside, there is no biological reason why human population level cannot be flat. We are a species that can conscientiously regulate procreation. Moreover, there is no economic reason why corporations cannot profit by serving the needs of a static base population. There is, however, an ecological reason why corporations cannot sustain continually increasing profits in perpetual growth. Stationary-state political economy frames economic activity within the biosphere. When conducting an economic analysis, Daly says, we must recognize that the total stock (consisting of wealth and people) is variable both in total size and in composition. Since there is a direct relationship between the size of the stock and the size of the throughput necessary to maintain the stock, we have a trade-off between size of total stock (viewed as benefit) and size of the flow of throughput (viewed as a cost); in other words, an increase in benefit implies an increase in cost[.] Within these limits this trade-off essentially represents the choice of a standard of living. Economics and ecology can at best specify the terms of this trade-off; the actual choice depends on ethical judgments (Daly and Townsend 1993, 32).

9.3 Ecological Industrial Political Economy: Invisible Hand with a Green Thumb It remains to sketch a basic ecological industrial political economy. An ecological industrial political economy is characterized by (1) laissez-faire markets and (2) prudent regulation of markets. This hybrid political economy takes the form of (3) ecologic capitalism.

9.3.1 Laissez-Faire Markets A laissez-faire market economy is based on autonomous producers and buyers entering a marketplace. The means of production (capital) is privately held, and trade between capitalists in a marketplace creates the greatest economic growth. The laissez-faire political economy is consistent and compatible with liberal democ-

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racy, as individuals have the freedom or liberty to become entrepreneurs and enter the marketplace. Economic theory of the liberal political tradition is founded on the assumption that individuals should enjoy the liberty, or freedom, to voluntarily engage in economic activity. Liberty includes producing and trading goods in an open, unregulated marketplace. Market mechanisms built on individual liberty allocate limited resources most efficiently. Market mechanisms are simple, straightforward, and predictable: a particular commodity in high demand and scarce supply will fetch a higher market price than that same commodity in low demand and abundance. In a laissez-faire market economy, the exchange price of commodities is determined by the choices of sellers and buyers set by the laws of supply and demand. The market mechanisms of supply and demand result in a division of labor into specialized productive capacities that further the general good. Therefore, a successful ecological political economy must put free market mechanisms to constructive use by rewarding innovation: those able to produce the best product at the lowest cost are rightfully compensated. As business writer Paul Hawken says, “No plan to reverse environmental degradation can be enacted if it requires a wholesale change in the dynamics of the market. We have to recognize and respect who we are; this includes a strong instinct to shop the market and buy products of comparable quality at the lowest price” (1993, xv). Still, market mechanisms in-and-of-themselves do not always result in the environmental and social good. Laissez-faire industrial political economy has the intrinsic structural tendency to damage the health and vigor of biotic communities by externalizing costs in order to maximize profits. This points to the problem of externalities. Economies can be internal or external. Internal economies frequently create external economies. An internal economy is a transaction between a producer and a consumer. An external economy is a consequence of that transaction for which an affected third party is not compensated. Such a consequence is an “externality.” An externality may be favorable or unfavorable: a favorable externality is an “external economy” and an unfavorable externality is an “external diseconomy” (Samuelson 1967, 450). Turning a field or a fen into a waste dump creates an external real estate diseconomy by lowering local property values. Cleaning up a waste dump and turning it into a park creates an external real estate economy by raising residential property values. For an example of a diseconomy, take the case of National City Lines. In the early twentieth century, many areas of the U.S. had efficient public light rail systems, as did Salt Lake City, Utah (Swett 1974). In the 1940s, several large automobile and truck equipment manufacturing corporations—General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil—formed a consortium named National City Lines (Black 2006, 199–200). The purpose of National City Lines was to acquire electric bus and trolley systems in dozens of U.S. cities, and promptly dismantle them (idem, 234). This occurred in some of the largest municipalities: Los Angeles, Oakland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and many smaller ones (idem, 258). National City Lines would then replace the systems with diesel buses and truncate or eliminate routes, hike fares, and reduce schedules (idem, 246). To ensure that the electric buses and

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trolleys would not be pressed back into service, they were incinerated (idem, 256–57). Now that the diseconomies of the automobile paradigm have become apparent—the cost to human health alone incurred by the burning of fossil fuels in the United States has been estimated at $120 billion annually (Wald 2009), and this does not even account for environmental costs. In the case of National City Lines, the benefit to the shareholders of General Motors and Firestone and Standard Oil was generated at the expense of the health and integrity of biotic communities, not to mention the affordability and convenience of citizens. Despite the dual character of external economies, most externalities are negative. The reason is simple: in a free-market economy, it is advantageous for any producer to socialize costs and privatize gains. Socializing costs and privatizing gains increases profits. There is an equally powerful incentive for producers to avoid creating positive externalities, because privatizing costs and socializing gains reduces profits. An external diseconomy is essentially a public subsidy of private profit. While the “invisible hand” guides transactions of self-interested individuals, the invisible foot kicks ecological communities (Daly and Townsend 1993, 34). While both external economies and diseconomies misallocate costs and benefits, in laissez-faire economies the problem of external diseconomies is far more acute than the problem of external economies. Consider two examples of external diseconomies. The first is the contamination of Milwaukee’s culinary water supply in 1993 caused by cryptosporidium protozoa (MacKenzie et al. 1994). The source of the contamination was not definitively identified, but evidence pointed to cattle along the rivers that flow into the Milwaukee harbor near a treatment plant, and local slaughterhouses (Blair 1995). The total public health cost of the outbreak was estimated to be on the order of $96 million (Corso et al. 2003, 429). Based on the assumption that the animal agriculture industry was the source of the cryptosporidium protozoa, then, for accurate pricing, $96 million should be included in the price of the products of animal agriculture. The public paid for the $96 million animal agriculture diseconomy. The second example is the diseconomy of steel production in Utah Valley. Utah Valley is a densely populated basin ringed by mountains in northern Utah. Utah Lake is a freshwater lake that sits in the middle of the valley. Geneva Steel is located on the eastern shore of the lake. Geneva Steel was decommissioned and ceased operations for thirteen months in the mid-1980s due to a labor dispute. During this period, a landmark epidemiological study found that the incidence of respiratory illness declined dramatically (Pope 1989). Then, when the plant reopened, the incidence of respiratory illness rose back to previous pre-shutdown levels (see Fig. 9.212 ). Local politicians and owners of the steel mill deflected attention away from the effects of Geneva’s pollution by attacking the validity of the study—which was later vindicated (Israelsen 2000)—and instead focused on easily-quantified benefits such as the number of jobs created and dollars added to the tax base. Later studies have confirmed a strong correlation between air pollution and adverse health effects (Dockery et al. 12 Because of temperature inversions, the level of pollution is much higher in the winter. For the purposes of this discussion, I have abstracted this factor out of Fig. 9.2.

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Fig. 9.2 Diseconomy of steel production to human health in Utah Valley, Utah (Keller 2005a, b)

1993, 1759) at levels lower than found in Utah Valley (Wilson and Gorrell 1993). Heavily polluted air has deleterious effects on the organisms—including humans—that live in biotic communities. These consequences are costs. In Utah Valley, the atmosphere—what ecologist Garret Hardin famously called a “common” (1968, 1244)—is a sink for emissions from the production of steel. The tragedy of the commons, Hardin argued, is a political economy where private economic prudence requires unchecked exploitation of commonly-held resources in order to maximize gains. The practical outcome is that the cost of production is shifted to a third party—the public—in the form of a degradation or destruction of the common. In the case of Geneva Steel, the cost of treating respiratory illness (C in Fig. 9.2) is a real cost of producing steel. Yet C was not paid for by Geneva, it was paid for by the community in the form of external health diseconomies. Essentially, the community was subsidizing the production of steel for private profit, resulting in misallocation of the costs and benefits of steel production. This is to say nothing to the costs borne by the adjacent Utah Lake ecosystem, as a result of effluent laden with heavy metals that were byproducts of the smelting process. When the Mormon pioneers first entered the area, Utah Lake was a haven for wildlife, teeming with now absent Bonneville cutthroat trout and a multitude of waterfowl. It also does not take account of the personal suffering caused by breathing polluted air—something that no one would wish for even if the medical costs were covered by another party. In both the cases of Milwaukee and Utah Valley, externalities distorted the real cost of economic activities by transferring costs from the producer to the public (Kapp 1971, 233). Both cases involved diseconomies “…of unpaid costs, ‘unpaid’ in so far as a substantial proportion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for

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in entrepreneurial outlays; instead they are shifted to, and ultimately borne by, third persons or by the community as a whole” (idem, 231). These examples illustrate how a laissez-faire political economy tends to be detrimental to the public good, as well as to the good of the larger biotic community, by externalizing the costs of production. The result is social injustice and environmental degradation. The problem of externalities points to the need for the regulation of markets.

9.3.2 Regulation of Markets English economist Arthur Pigou proposed a solution to the problem of externalities (1928, 1946). In The Economy of Welfare, Pigou proposes the taxation of producers of negative externalities (1946, 192). Taxation “corrects maladjustments” between external and internal economies by incentivizing producers to minimize negative externalities (1928, 114–120). Pigouvian taxation restructures the framework within which corporations compete. Pigouvian taxation rewards innovation in the mitigation of externalities and minimizes inefficiencies caused by cost misallocation (Stiglitz 1988, 221). Though initially developed in terms of taxation, the ideas of Pigou can also be interpreted in terms of public subsidies for techniques and technologies that reduce externalities. For example, governments can stimulate innovative methods of internalizing externalities through public subsidies for technologies that minimize external diseconomies, as is frequently done to promote use of solar power technologies. Coase (1960) argued that Pigouvian compensation is irrelevant: it is true that external diseconomies represent misallocations of costs, but it is not true that regulatory intervention in the form of Pigouvian compensation is the answer.13 According to Coase, there is a free-market solution, which obviates the need for a public-sector solution. If the originator of an external diseconomy and the victim of the external diseconomy are rational, self-serving agents, then they can negotiate with one another. At some point, the victim of the external diseconomy will be willing to pay the originator of the external diseconomy to stop the offensive activity, because the elimination of the external diseconomy is worth something to the victim and worth something to the originator to cease operations. If I am polluting your air, at some point you will be willing to pay me to stop polluting, because for you a payout outweighs the cost of tolerating it. And your payment to me benefits me more than the benefit of continued polluting. Basing economic policy on negotiations of selfish rational economic agents (i.e., private-sector solutions) is far more desirable than appealing to nebulous “aesthetics and morals” of externalities (idem, 43), Coase argued. External diseconomies can be more effectively mitigated through the negotiations of self-serving rational agents than through governmental policy.

13 The

analysis of Coase (1960) was anticipated by Knight (1924).

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The flaw in Coase’s analysis of Pigou is the presupposition that power relations between those responsible for creating the diseconomies and those affected is symmetrical. The failure of private-sector solutions to the problem of external diseconomies is evident in the issue of ecological injustice (Keller 2011). The asymmetrical power dynamic between industrial corporations and poor communities has been well documented by social scientists: citizens of poor communities fighting environmental hazards are disadvantaged by political corruption (Pellow 2004, 521). The film Erin Brockovich, by Steven Soderbergh, is a dramatic portrayal of one such incident. One is reminded of honest business owners having to pay gangsters for protection against immanent harm from those very gangsters. In summary, the mitigation of diseconomies through regulation reduces market distortion. The internalization of externalities helps “to fully understand what things truly cost [and] reexamine those activities in terms of accurate market information” (Hawken 1993, 172). Integrating the true costs of production into market price does not increase the overall expenditure of consumers but rather accurately allocate costs (idem, 83). The internalization of externalities reduces market distortion and increases market efficiency through a transparent allocation of costs and benefits of industrial activity.

9.3.3 No-Diseconomy Capitalism Simply, no-diseconomy capitalism prohibits the creation of diseconomies. It is a form of laissez-faire market in which the full, or comprehensive, range of the costs and benefits of industrial activity are recognized in public policy.14 It assumes that every successful economy at its core contains a market economy (Stiglitz 2010). It retains private property as a motivation for agents to enter the marketplace and generate economic activity.15 No-diseconomy capitalism can be thought of as a hybrid political economy consisting of a socialist superstructure of regulation built upon a libertarian substructure of laissez-faire markets. No-diseconomy capitalism is best described in terms of business writer John Elkington’s heuristic of the Triple Bottom Line (1998, 70–96). In addition to the traditional capitalist bottom line of profit, Elkington argues that business decisions must be made with consideration to two other “bottom lines:” social justice and environmental quality (idem, 73). Using triple-bottom-line methodology, business 14 The market version of an ecological industrial political economy is not revolutionary. Ecological political economy “…is not about fomenting social upheaval. On the contrary, that is the consequence that will surely arise if fundamental social and environmental problems are not reasonably addressed” (Hawken et al. 1999, 322). 15 However, in an ecological political economy a vast majority of natural resources must be held by the public, such as large tracts of ecological systems, which are publicly owned and off-limits to natural resource development. Areas of unique biodiversity, such as remote wilderness, and areas of little economic utility but with great ecological value, such as marshland, must be off-limits to natural resource development.

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decisions differ from the traditional single bottom line of profit, since more factors are weighed. As has been clear since Marx and Engels brought attention to the plight of the working poor in Britain and elsewhere—see e.g. Engels’ description of Manchester, England (Marx and Engels 1975, 350–54)—profit is often generated at the expense of social justice. For example, a garment manufacturer may be able to avoid adhering to U.S. labor law by moving its operations from Manhattan to Matamoras and exploiting Mexican children. However, the triple bottom line mandates that if the company decides to move, it should limit working hours, buy safe equipment, provide health and medical benefits, even if Mexican law does not require it. The environmental bottom line may of course impact the economic bottom line. The defunct Magnesium Corporation of America, which allegedly dumped heavy metals, dioxins, and hexachlorbenzols (HCBs) in unlined ditches in the west desert of Utah, was eventually sued by the Environmental Protection Agency for $902 million on 16 violations (Fahys and Oberbeck 2003, A14). The plant emitted enough chlorine and sulfur dioxide to make the Magnesium Corporation of America at one time the worst air polluter in the nation (Spangler and Spangler 2001). The Magnesium Corporation of America’s modus operandi would have been different if their business decisions included the environmental bottom line. The environmental bottom line may also impact the social justice bottom line. Again, in Tooele County, Utah some members of the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Indians sought to improve their grim economic situation by proposing to store 40,000 metric tons of highly radioactive uranium on their desolate reservation (Keller 2001a, b, c). But given the fact that the waste would be stored within close proximity to more than one million people and could have dire consequences to them as well as the non-human biota, arguably other economic development programs should take preference. There is no biological reason why the human population cannot be stable while the conditions of life improve and our ecosystems are protected. Technological advances will still increase people’s standard of living, and culture can still be advanced through refinements in religion, art, and ethics, etc. There is also no economic reason why corporations cannot profit by serving the needs of a static population. While some diseconomies can be quantified in monetary terms, other diseconomies—aesthetic, moral, ecological, cultural, religious—cannot. Notwithstanding the fact that some diseconomies cannot be given a market price, it does not follow that they should be excluded from the analysis. Al Gore put it well: “Our current system of economics arbitrarily draws a circle of value around those things in our civilization we have decided to keep track of and measure. Then we discover that one of the easiest ways to artificially increase the value of things inside the circle is to do so at the expense of those things left outside the circle[.] A direct and perverse ratio emerges: the more pollution dumped into the river, the bigger the short-term profits for the polluter and his shareholders[.] Our failure to measure environmental externalities is a kind of economic blindness, and its consequences can be staggering” (1992, 189).

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9.4 Conclusion Conservation ethics and bioempathy are inseparable. Each is a necessary condition for the other in a globalized world on a planet capable of sustaining large human populations through many generations. The life of a human being living alone in the proverbial “state of nature” might be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes 1985), but at least he or she is hardly likely to cause the extinction of another species or destroy an ecosystem. What we must try to understand is how conservation ethics and ecological justice are interdependent in the modern world—why we can’t have one without the other. Is it just that resources are finite and the human population large and growing? Or is it that the prevailing expansionary political economy is inherently unjust? The answer is: Both! Ecological justice encompasses ethical treatment of ecosystems as prescribed by Leopold’s Land Ethic, but it also enjoins human social and economic justice. Human social and economic justice does not require absolute equality, but it at least requires economic and social fairness (Rawls 1971). We cannot have a world in which consumption outstrips the availability of resources and yet where human beings are all approximately equally free and materially well-off. This is not possible because, despite the reported “miracle of five loaves and two fish,” (John 6: 1–14) the world is, for all realistic purposes, finite. Resources are finite and will remain finite. This really comes home when we consider that by “resources” we don’t just mean things like copper and wood, or even clean air and water, but the hugely complex biosphere, consisting of myriad interdependent coevolving parts. This is the indispensable wellspring of all life, yet human beings are removing the parts at an alarming rate and in so doing are dramatically altering the functioning of the whole system. Unabated, this has the potential to kill the planet—and us along with it. Ultimately, the only thing that can change this trajectory is a world-wide change in our values. And this transvaluation of values will necessarily go hand-in-hand with an enlightened and more accurate understanding (and appreciation) of what it really means to be a human being—a being that is not above or below the rest of creation, but is one member of the biotic community among millions. Or, as Aldo Leopold put it: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land… A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (Leopold 1949). Against the backdrop of ultimate finitude of resources, consider that industrial capitalism of the expansionary variety depends upon an endless round of natural resource exploitation, consumption and human population growth. It is a vicious cycle of ever-expanding bloat that does injustice to the entire biosphere, to regional ecosystems, and to living beings, including, ultimately, to human beings. It succeeds in feeding itself only by turning everything into a commodity, including human beings, who, like raw materials, are inexorably exploited in the process. In addition, the unabated pursuit of profit that is the engine of such a system produces external

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costs that the environment and the public are unjustly forced to bear. As a result of both reasons—unabated exploitation of finite resources and the production of external costs—the vast majority of human beings are deprived of fair access to opportunities for self-improvement and a better life, as well as the benefit of a fullyfunctioning, beautiful, sustainable and livable world. Even before it crashes against the bounds of finitude, by its very nature this is an engine of injustice. Consequently, it is imperative that we learn to be good citizens of our biotic community. At the root of the problem is human acquisitiveness—the selfish drive to possess, dominate, appropriate and control nature, including other human beings. The result is injustice on a global scale. Somehow, we need to learn to become less acquisitive, less avaricious, less greedy. We need to learn to value the natural world and our natural place in it above all else. This is the transvaluation of values that good citizenship in the environmental community calls for. It will require our humility and compassion. And it will only be within reach so long as we save enough of the natural world that we can still get to really know it and love it.

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Chapter 10

Beauty, Bioempathy and Ecological Ethics Kirk Robinson

Abstract A central thesis of Chap. 8 is that aesthetics, via bioempathy, provides a bridge between “is” and “ought”. Without it, there cannot be an ecologically informed ethics or ecological justice. The final chapter of this book seeks to both illustrate and argue for such a bridge—or what is perhaps more accurately described as a circumvention of the problem. The author provides an illustration from his own experience illustrating how the “is” and “ought” gap is circumvented in real life. Experiences of beauty in nature (an intrinsic value) can result in bioempathy (a subjective affect), which in turn produces good citizenship in the biotic community. This avoids the naturalistic fallacy by (1) providing for rational inferences from descriptions to prescriptions (and proscriptions), and (2) providing a motive for adhering to the same. Experiences of natural beauty, particularly of living beings and systems, induce bioempathy, which moves us to show appropriate respect and restraint in our treatment of nature. At the same time, recognition of beauty as an intrinsic value provides a rational ground for pertinent prescriptions and proscriptions. Thus, inferences from description to prescription, from “is” to “ought”, don’t have to be metaphysical leaps of faith. One can argue that we human beings have a moral duty to each other to conserve natural ecosystems and biota because our lives and our well-being require them. But a big part of the argument of this book is that we also have a duty to conserve ecosystems and biota for their own sake; and furthermore, that this is a practical necessity for fulfilling our duty of care to each other and to future generations—that is, to being good citizens of the biotic community. Supposing this is correct, what is there to ground our duty to conserve ecosystems and biota for their own sake? Why should we care? If the argument is not to be wholly anthropocentric, then it seems we must grant intrinsic value to non-human nature, or at least to much of it. The intrinsic value of nature, then, is the ground of our duty to be good citizens of the biotic community. Furthermore, this is not posited merely for the sake of the conclusion and in defiance of the naturalistic fallacy. Both Keller and the author of the Chap. 10 argue, in different ways, that nature possesses intrinsic value and that this value is beauty. Because this beauty is objective and real, it provides both a rational justification and a motive for conservation that is independent of strictly anthropocentric considerations.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 D. R. Keller, Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities, Studies in Global Justice 19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_10

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10.1 The Owl of Athena This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it (Jeffers 1934).

The summer I was 16, I worked alongside my grandfather on his ranch. I learned to drive a tractor, buck hay, saddle a horse, round up calves, and brand them. The days were long and the work hard. After dinner, I had time to myself. One evening I went for a walk with my Winchester 0.22 rifle, on the lookout for something to shoot. In those days, it was a rite of passage for western boys to get a “varmint” rifle at about age 14. While walking a path along the edge of an alfalfa field, I espied a large bird with a whitish breast standing in the middle of the field about 100 yards away. I wasn’t sure it was a varmint, but it was a sitting duck, so to speak. So, pointing my rifle in the direction of the bird and raising it slightly to allow for distance, I pulled the trigger. Instantly the bird fell over. Excitedly, I climbed over the fence and ran over to it. It was a barn owl, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was stone dead, its dark eyes wide open. I wondered what to do with it. Taxidermy wasn’t an option, but just leaving it seemed terribly wasteful, so I plucked out a few tail feathers and sawed off its talons with my pocket knife. Stowing my trophies in a shirt pocket, I carried the dead bird to the edge of the field and threw it into the sagebrush. Then I began walking back to the ranch house in the waning light. As I walked along, feeling remorseful for what I’d done, another owl just like the one I’d killed appeared and began to fly silent circles a few feet above my head. It occurred to me that it was probably the mate of the dead owl and that it might attack me out of revenge, so I stopped. When I did, it lit on the nearest fence post a few feet away and stared straight into my face with its big dark eyes. Spooky! What was it doing? I thought of shooting it, too, but hated to do it. Instead, I tried shooting at the post beneath it, hoping to scare it off, but it didn’t so much as move a feather. I resumed walking again and it resumed circling me on its silent wings. I stopped again and it stopped too, lighting on the nearest fence post and silently staring straight into my face. I shot at the post. The owl did not move. This was repeated several times, the owl following me all the way back to the ranch house, each time silently looking me in the face with its big dark eyes. I don’t know what became of my trophies, but the memory of that experience has remained with me for 50 years. It was my Aldo Leopold moment.

10.2 A Fierce Green Fire In the Foreword to A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold says, “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot” (Leopold 1949). Leopold’s remark suggests that his chief interest in the essays was wilderness preservation and wildlife conservation.

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But he didn’t start out with these concerns. He was educated at the Yale Forest School in the first decade of the twentieth century, where the guiding principle was the strictly utilitarian one of sustainable use, as set forth by Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. His first job, at age 22, was Forest Assistant in the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. In his essay, Thinking like a Mountain, Leopold recounts an experience from the time he was a young Forest Assistant, when he participated in killing a Mexican wolf (aka lobo) and her pups. (Today the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) is on the brink of extinction, with just over 100 lobos living in the wild in the United States and Mexico, all of them descended from the last seven lobos on Earth.) After raining a fusillade of bullets on some wolves they espied in a gorge, Leopold and his companion climbed down to where she lay bleeding, arriving in time for him to “watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He goes on to say, “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain” (Leopold 1949). Leopold saw something in the eyes of the old wolf that suggested an ancient connection between it and the mountain. I don’t think we will go wrong if we understand the wolf to represent wildness, the ultimate otherness, the antipode of the humandominated world, and the mountain to represent wilderness, the place of wildness. Leopold’s account doesn’t read as though he experienced a sudden and dramatic change of aspect, as happens with ambiguous figures like the old woman-young woman and the duck-rabbit drawings, which can be seen now one way, now another, but there is no doubt that he was profoundly affected by his experience. He had the uncanny sense that he was seeing something new, something mysterious, but didn’t know what it was. Like my experience with the barn owls, Leopold’s experience with the wolf must have initially affected him emotionally more than it did intellectually; but over time its intellectual import dawned on him, ultimately changing the way he looked at nature and his own place in nature. He came to view nature more deeply in terms of relationships, such as the predator-prey relationship, and the complex roles of living things in the larger biotic community. He began to understand and appreciate untrammeled nature more fully as a complex, self-organizing and evolving whole. He came to view nature from an entirely new perspective—a change in perspective that entailed no longer seeing himself as a “land conqueror,” but as a “plain citizen” and member of the whole community of life. Many years later he wrote, “I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end-result of a life-journey, in the course of which I have felt sorrow, anger, puzzlement or confusion over the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of land abuse” (quoted in Callicott 1987). Near the end of his life, Leopold formulated his famous “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, my emphasis). This famous passage is frequently quoted, but to my knowledge has never received the kind of attention I believe it deserves. Notice the words ‘right’, ‘wrong’, and ‘beauty’. These are value terms, whereas ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’ are scientific terms that apply to facts. This stark contrast invites reflection. According to common opinion, the dif-

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ference is that the facts investigated by the natural sciences are objective features of the material world and obtain independently of what people happen to believe, whereas value is a mental attitude towards something and is therefore subjective, i.e., dependent upon a mind (whatever that is).

10.3 Aesthetic Blindness Compare it with the following passage taken from a recent New York Times op-ed account of an encounter with wolves written by wolf researcher Arthur Middleton, titled “Is the Wolf a Real American Hero?” I recognize that it is hard to see the wolf through clear eyes. For me, it has happened only once. It was a frigid, windless February morning, and I was tracking a big gray male wolf just east of Yellowstone. The snow was so soft and deep that it muffled my footsteps. I could hear only the occasional snap of a branch. Then suddenly, a loud “yip!” I looked up to see five dark shapes in a clearing, less than a hundred feet ahead. Incredibly, the wolves hadn’t noticed me. Four of them milled about, wagging and playing. The big male stood watching, and snarled when they stumbled close. Soon, they wandered on, vanishing one by one into the falling snow. That may have been the only time I truly saw the wolf, during three long winters of field work. Yet in that moment, it was clear that this animal doesn’t need our stories. It just needs us to see it, someday, for what it really is (Middleton 2014).

Perhaps intentionally, this account is vaguely reminiscent of Aldo Leopold’s account of seeing the fierce green fire die in the old she-wolf’s eyes, but one hardly knows what to make of it. Consider the final sentence “It [the wolf] just needs us to see it, someday, for what it really is.” And what, pray tell, is that? What does it take to clear our eyes and see the wolf for what it really is? Unfortunately, Middleton didn’t say. Perhaps he didn’t know. One interpretation of his account is that it describes the first time Middleton ever observed wolves in a detached mood—that is, without distraction and without engagement of his will pro or con—and that he recounted the experience accordingly to caution people against getting carried away by their feelings about wolves. Less charitably, it can be interpreted as suggesting that, however interesting wolves might be from a scientific perspective, they have no intrinsic value, positive or negative—there just happen to be different attitudes towards them, that’s all, with some people loving and admiring them and some people hating and reviling them. It is certainly true that wolves evoke wildly different sentiments in different people. There is probably no other species that is more controversial. One would like to accept the charitable interpretation, but the article as a whole accuses both sides in the debate over wolf recovery of projecting false portraits onto the animal—portraits that are based on myth and emotion—which suggests that Middleton, at least at the time he wrote the article, thought all human valuations of wolves, pro or con, are subjective and arbitrary, and that the accurate and proper stance is one of strict value neutrality: they are neither good nor bad, they just are.

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This interpretation is supported by the fact that Middleton says nothing to suggest that he found the wolves beautiful or that watching them gave him pleasure, as you would expect from someone who has enjoyed an aesthetic experience. His passionless matter-of-fact manner of description was the same as he used to record his observation that it was snowing. Which interpretation shall we accept? Can we make true evaluative judgments about wolves or not? Clearly Middleton was trying to caution us against getting carried away by our emotions with respect to wolves, which is good advice, but the mere fact that he did not realize the ambiguity of his remark suggests that he was himself unclear on this very point. Perhaps, like Leopold, his understanding has evolved since then.

10.4 Facts and Values: The Common View It is well-known that you cannot logically derive a value statement from a set of factual statements. In other words, statements about publicly observable facts never logically entail statements that appraise the quality of those facts (as beautiful or ugly, good or bad). To think otherwise is to commit what has been dubbed “the naturalistic fallacy.” (Moore 1903) This means that it is possible for all the factual statements to be true and the value statement false, this possibility rendering the inference from the one to the other fallacious. Compare these two inferences to see the point: “This instrument is a violin, therefore it is a musical instrument” and “This violin is a Stradivarius, therefore it will have a beautiful tone”. In the first example, the conclusion has to be true if the premise is true because the first concept, ‘violin’, is included in the second one, ‘musical instrument’. Not so in the second example. It doesn’t follow as a matter of logic that a given violin will produce a beautiful tone just because it is a Stradivarius. It is conceivable that it will be ordinary or sub-par. Accordingly, the first is an example of logical entailment, the second a lack thereof. The violin in question might have a beautiful tone nonetheless, and it might be reasonable to expect that it will, but that is beside the point. The point is that there is a philosophical puzzle as to whether beauty (a value) can be a real objective feature of things, or whether it is strictly subjective—something “in the eye of the beholder” as it were. If we can’t logically deduce that something is beautiful from a complete factual description of it, then what basis is there for ascribing beauty to it? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to simply say “I like it”? Leopold was certainly aware of a deep difference between fact terms and value terms, and no doubt deliberately meant to imply that, despite this difference, facts can be bearers of value—value in “the philosophical sense,” as he put it (Leopold 1949), or what is more commonly referred to as intrinsic value—and that this value is not dependent upon any minds but is just as real and just as much a part of the material world as those facts. I suspect this conviction was planted in his mind decades earlier by the incident with the wolf, though he would not have understood it in these terms at the time.

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We have here two quite different views of the relation between facts and values. On the common view, the facts that make up the natural world are “objective” and value free (neither good nor bad), while values are “subjective” mental attitudes that can shift even while the facts of the world remain the same. According to this view, people project their personal values onto a reality that in itself is value free, i.e., value neutral. This is a more general version of the popular idea that beauty, which is a kind of value, is strictly in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, this is supposed to be a truism. And no doubt there is truth in it. People do often make different aesthetic (and ethical) evaluations concerning the same matters of fact. However, it may not be the whole truth. Value can still be more than private sentiment. Maybe some things really do have intrinsic value in the sense of being beautiful, although not everyone is capable of experiencing or appreciating their beauty. Science reinforces the common view of facts and values by training us to think of the natural world as consisting exclusively of assemblages of mind-independent physical facts that are in principle susceptible of exhaustive description in quantitative terms, such as mass and momentum, representable in precise mathematical formulae á la Newton’s three laws of motion. This view receives strong reinforcement from the dominant economic paradigm of our time, which treats all things as human resources having only extrinsic value—as commodities to be sold and used at will. This “resourcism” is even reflected in the names of wildlife management agencies and institutions, such as the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the somewhat oxymoronic “Utah State University Department of Wildland Resources.”

10.5 Facts and Values: A Competing View A competing view of facts and values is that facts are not always value neutral, but are sometimes bearers of value, and that appreciation of this value is required for sound moral judgment and appropriate action. This value is supposed to be intrinsic to things. It is value that things are believed to have independently of human valuing—a kind of value that a thing possesses just by virtue of its very being but that isn’t captured by scientific theories and isn’t commensurable with economic value, and which therefore cannot be represented in a cost-benefit analysis. On this view, Leopold’s experience of the fierce green fire might have been a glimpse of the intrinsic value of the wolf and of wildness. Something similar will have been true of me and my experience with the owl. It is probably a mistake to try to get too technical about this “bearer of” relationship between facts and values, but the idea is that things can possess value simply by virtue of the facts that comprise them. This is important, for if facts can be bearers of value they can also have implications for how we ought to treat things, the naturalistic fallacy notwithstanding. If something has intrinsic value, this value is a reason for us to respect it and to exercise appropriate restraint in our treatment of it. We can put it this way: to possess intrinsic value is to possess a kind of inherent goodness, and what possesses inherent goodness we should not harm without good reason. I

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take this conjunction of propositions to state a necessary truth as well as a moral truth. Conversely, to say that something is good, but that there is nothing wrong with harming it, is a kind of contradiction, a necessary falsehood. It is important to see that this way of construing intrinsic value does not commit the naturalistic fallacy. Natural processes and objects, as well as living beings, might be bearers of value in this sense even though factual statements describing them do not logically entail value statements. For example, by definition, a good violin will produce a beautiful tone even though no number of true factual statements about its components and construction will ensure, by dint of logic alone, that it will have a beautiful tone. We learn that it has a beautiful tone, not by reasoning about it, but by listening to it when played by a skilled violinist. Similarly for an owl or a wolf: we come to appreciate its beauty by observing it, particularly as it goes about its life in the wild, and by learning about its natural history and ecological role. Beauty is not always obvious. Frequently it takes special instruction or experience for people to be able to perceive and appreciate the beauty of an artwork, for example, or the beauty of a wolf, or the complex beauty of an ecosystem. It is also important to recognize that value assessments that take intrinsic values into account are not normally arrived at through linear chains of reasoning of any kind—deductive or inductive—as you might calculate the cost of building a garage by summing the costs of supplies and labor (deduction) or predict a storm based on present atmospheric data and past experience (induction). (Indeed, the impossibility of deducing truths about value from truths about facts is the whole point of the naturalistic fallacy.) Rather, they are intuitive assessments of what is good, or best, formed after due reflection upon the relevant facts.

10.6 Chicken or Egg? To paraphrase Socrates’ question to Euthyphro in the dialog by that name, do things have intrinsic value because we value them for their own sake, or do we value them for their own sake because they have intrinsic value? As a first step towards answering this pivotal question, we should remind ourselves that “intrinsic value” is commonly understood in two quite different ways, as outlined in the previous two sections. First, it is often understood (misunderstood, really) as the non-instrumental and non-monetary value that something has for a person or persons—something that is enjoyed for its own sake, like a sunset or dancing. This is the way that most people understand it, including, no doubt, most scientists, most economists and not a few conservationists. On this view, finding something beautiful is all there is to its being beautiful. But “intrinsic value” can also be understood as referring to the value that a thing has just by virtue of its being: like the specific gravity of a block of rosewood or the hardness of diamond—properties that are completely independent of all things human and that might be regarded as essential to whatever possesses them. Philosophers will typically understand it this way, the only difference being that physical properties are measurable.

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These two ways of construing intrinsic value, while logically distinct, are also logically compatible. In fact, if a thing has intrinsic value just by virtue of its being, that would be an excellent reason for us to value it for its own sake. Unfortunately, these two conceptions are rarely distinguished, but are instead unwittingly conflated, with resulting confusion and uncertainty about what intrinsic value is or whether there is any such thing. Furthermore, upon reflection, one can easily see that the first kind of “intrinsic” value is really not a kind of intrinsic value at all, but a kind of “extrinsic” value in the sense that it depends upon human valuing. After all, if no one were to value a thing for its own sake, on this view it would have no intrinsic value. So, if you think of intrinsic value this way, you might legitimately doubt that there truly is any such thing, for how can valuing something for its own sake actually imbue it with intrinsic value in the second sense? You might as well wish for a pile of garbage to be a pile of gold, expecting a magical transformation. It would be no more miraculous. Maybe this confusion explains Middleton’s diffidence about what it is like to see the wolf “for what it really is.”

10.7 Varieties of Intrinsic Value Assuming that intrinsic value is an objective quality of some things, what sorts of things might possess it? Connected with this question, we might even ask whether there are some things that possess negative intrinsic value—that are, as it were, evil. While I am strongly inclined to think so—the phenomenon of pain being an obvious candidate—I will leave this question aside to concentrate on “positive” intrinsic value. In addition to the question about what sorts of things might possess intrinsic value, we need to address two others: What is it about something by virtue of which it possesses intrinsic value? and How can we know whether there is such a thing as intrinsic value construed as an objective quality of things? I shall tackle these three questions in order, in this and the remaining two sections. Living beings arguably possess intrinsic value, and some nonliving things too: a Stradivarius violin or Van Gogh painting, for example. A fine violin presumably has intrinsic value as a work of art in its own right, as well as instrumental value for producing beautiful music in the right hands—music that also has intrinsic value by virtue of its beauty. Yet one might wonder, if intrinsic values cannot be reckoned in monetary or numerical terms—if they aren’t comprised of discrete atomic units of equal value—how can we compare intrinsic values when we must decide which of competing ones is the greater? Or is all intrinsic value equal? I believe we can state some general truths. The concept of intrinsic value certainly does not require that all instances of intrinsic value are equal just because it is a type of value that can’t be quantified. There can be grades of intrinsic value nonetheless. For example, I think we can plausibly say that, in general and other things being equal, living beings have greater intrinsic value than non-living things, and that a human life has greater intrinsic value than a whale’s life, and similarly for a whale’s

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life relative to the life of an octopus, and an octopus’s life relative to the life of a clam. There can be a hierarchy of grades of intrinsic values. Among living things, I should think complexity of the nervous system, including the brain, is an important consideration, along with consciousness, sentience, curiosity, the ability to learn new behaviors, the capacity for reasoning, and moral agency. No doubt we still have much to learn in this regard. For example, it is a fairly recent discovery that corvids, such as jays, have prodigious memories for such things as where they stashed thousands of individual pine seeds, each in its own spot; and octopuses are not just strange blobs of protoplasm, but have brains and nervous systems of a kind suggesting that they may experience emotions. Perhaps it is our prerogative to regard our own species as “higher” and more valuable than others—perhaps we can’t help but do so—but it doesn’t follow that all the others have no value apart from how useful they are to us. As far as that goes, if there is a serious doubt about the intrinsic value of non-human beings, there is no apparent reason why the same doubt would not also apply to human beings, yielding the implication that the value of each person amounts to nothing more than his or her usefulness to some other person or persons. This would appear to license slavery, murder and rape, which seems counterintuitive to say the least. The caveat “in general and other things being equal” two paragraphs up is important. Chopping down a fine old red spruce to build a fire to roast marshmallows would be wrong, but using the wood to produce fine acoustic guitar tops would arguably justify the loss, assuming there are plenty of red spruces left. On the other hand, killing an elephant for its ivory or for a trophy is quite another matter, regardless of how many elephants there are. This doesn’t necessarily imply that external factors such as rarity contribute to a thing’s intrinsic value, only that external factors might contribute to its overall value, just as a rare silver dollar is usually valued more highly than a common silver dollar. Now let’s climb to a higher level of abstraction. In his foundational article “What is Conservation Biology?” conservation biologist Michael Soulé proposed three moral axioms: “Diversity of organisms is good,” “Ecological complexity is good,” and “Evolution is good.” (Soulé 1985) The good ascribed in these axioms is intrinsic and is represented most fully and perfectly in wilderness, where the world is wild, e.g., “self-willed,” and is not subjected to our dominating influence. That is where you find each of the three axioms satisfied most fully. We can group kinds or grades of intrinsic value into four broad categories exemplified by (1) sentience—that is, the capacity of a living organism to experience simple sensations, such as pain and pleasure; (2) the capacity for “higher” mental processes, such as perception, reason and the like, as well as emotions, particularly empathy, and the ability to ask (and answer) moral questions; (3) the complex workings of nature (e.g., wild ecosystems and the multitude of organisms and interactions that comprise them); and (4) human artifacts, including such things as musical instruments, works of art, scientific and philosophical theories, and mathematical proofs. This is just one possible taxonomy. What these examples have in common, I submit, is that they all exhibit beauty, each in its own way. And this beauty is not just a matter of our finding them beautiful, but rather of them being beautiful.

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10.8 The Multiplicity of Beauty What is it that makes something beautiful? Aestheticians find this question irresistible, but I doubt if it possible to grasp the essence of beauty in all its variety by means of imagination or reason—not because imagination and reason are not up to the task, but rather because there is no such thing as the essence of beauty. Different things, or kinds of things, are beautiful by virtue of being the particular things, or kinds of things, they are (this includes living beings, natural systems, and natural processes). And this has to do with specific and unique facts about each. Just as games need not all have one feature or set of features in common, beautiful things need not all have some essential “sameness” in common to be beautiful. Nor must we have a general idea of beauty in mind—a universal mental template, as it were—by comparison with which we can judge whether something is beautiful. Familiarity with the object or objects in question is all we can have and all we need. Of course, there can be degrees of familiarity, yielding different assessments.

10.9 Dispelling Skepticism About Intrinsic Value So far this amounts only to an exposition of the concept of intrinsic value qua beauty—one that is philosophically controversial at that. The really important question of whether there is any such thing as beauty, construed as an intrinsic value, remains unanswered. As a first step toward answering it, consider this example: If you have pine logs and a Stradivarius violin, and you want to make a fire to heat your cabin, which will you burn first? I dare say that you will burn the pine logs, not the violin, even if you are unable to play the violin, it is not a family heirloom, and the option of selling it is not available to you. Are you being irrational or arbitrary? Why not? Isn’t the answer simply that the violin has a lot more intrinsic value than the pine logs? Surely this thesis has at least as much going for it as the thesis that neither has any intrinsic value at all and that they are merely two potential resources. In fact, I believe it has a lot more going for it. Beauty, a kind of intrinsic value, is itself various: the beauty of a fine musical instrument is not qualitatively identical to the beauty of a symphony orchestra performance, which is not qualitatively identical to the beauty of a tiger, which is not qualitatively identical to the beauty of a healthy ecosystem. Indeed, they are so different that I seriously doubt that a satisfactorily unifying and illuminating theory of beauty (or of intrinsic value) can be contrived. But it would be fallacious to conclude from this that beauty is merely an affectation of the mind. We are not forced to conclude that the beauty of each is merely “in the eye (or ear) of the beholder,” rather than a feature of the “mind-independent” world there to be seen and heard. It is silly to ask whether a tiger is still beautiful when no one is looking at it. What sort of doubt can there be? It still has stripes too. Or is there a right way to look at a tiger

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that will reveal it as having no stripes? The burden of proof is entirely on the skeptic (Stroud 2000). I conjecture that the skeptical doubt arises from an unconscious tendency, peculiar to us humans, to reify the contents of our consciousness. In this case, by confusing one’s experience of a thing with the thing experienced—as though one’s visual experience of a tiger, stripes and all, is some sort of queer entity in its own right, residing in the “mental space” of one’s mind, and is the thing that is really striped, and really beautiful, and really experienced—not the tiger out there in physical space. But it is impossible to make coherent sense of such a notion, and therefore hard to make sense of the skeptical doubt. Where is the tiger-simulacrum that is supposed to arise in the mind when a person looks at a tiger? A neurosurgeon won’t find it in the brain of someone who is looking at a tiger, though he might find a neural correlate of the experience of seeing it. The closest thing to a tiger-simulacrum that we know anything about is the image on the retinas of the eyes when someone is looking at a tiger. But eyes and retinas are still objects in the physical world: we see objects in physical space with them; we don’t see our retinas. And even if we did, as opthalmologists routinely do when they examine the retinas of their patients, we would still be seeing something in physical space. Let’s switch to an even simpler example. When you look at the full moon against the dark horizon and hold out a dime next to it at arm’s length, you might say that it looks to be about the size of a dime. But the moon certainly isn’t the size of a dime (or the shape of a dime, for that matter). So, is your visual image of the full moon about the size of a dime? And where should we look for this visual image in order to measure it and to see if it is the color of the moon and as beautiful as the moon? Doesn’t it make a lot more sense to dispense with the idea of the “inner” mental image and just talk about the moon itself? In reality, the moon is 2,159 miles in diameter and is roughly It is in reality 238,900 miles from Earth. And it is really beautiful, too. Just look at it and see. Granted, we do sometimes speak of beautiful experiences, which grammatically speaking has beauty qualifying experience. And isn’t experience subjective? Perhaps, but when describing our experiences we don’t think of them as some sort of queer thing inhabiting our minds, in total isolation from the physical world. Granted, when we describe our experiences, we do sometimes focus exclusively on their subjective aspects—our feelings and thoughts—but typically these feelings and thoughts, which are “internal” to our minds if you like, are connected to things we do, or things that we observe, or things that happen to us in a world of physical objects, including our own bodies—in other words, with things that are not “in” our minds. And these things are normally also represented, along with feelings and thoughts, in our descriptions of our experiences. To see what I mean, ask yourself whether this hypothetical utterance makes sense spoken in seriousness: “It was a dreadfully smoggy, cold, wet day, and my feet ached as I walked to work. It was really a beautiful experience.” That would be sarcasm. Now contrast it with “It was a beautiful, sunny day, the air was blue, birds were singing and the lilacs were in bloom, as I walked to work. It was a beautiful experience.” The experience was beautiful because the day was beautiful.

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You can’t listen to beautiful music with your ears covered or perceive the beauty of a landscape with your eyes closed, but that doesn’t mean they are only beautiful while they are being perceived. Nor does it constitute a reason for doubting that they are beautiful. And if beauty is a real feature of the natural world apart from our perceptions, feelings, sentiments and thoughts, that is surely reason enough, morally speaking, for us to take good care of our beautiful planet and its myriad creatures. It’s not only a good idea, it’s the right thing to do. It is in this sense that beauty provides us with a rational “foundation” for conservation ethics as well as a motive for conservation action.

10.10 Beauty, Bioempathy and Ecological Ethics Plato taught that the immaterial forms of beauty and justice are essential aspects of the all-inclusive form of the Good; and that the temporal stream of mutable, ephemeral, material substances mirrors the immutable, eternal immaterial forms. This idea suggests not only that there is an important relationship between the abstract concepts of beauty and justice, but an important relationship between beauty and justice in the world of our everyday existence as well. The crucial question is this: Is it possible to have a beautiful and unjust world or a just and ugly world? Or are they necessary to each other, as Plato suggests? It’s pretty obvious that instances of all four (beauty, ugliness, justice, injustice) exist, suggesting that Plato was wrong. But suppose we take these terms more broadly as applying to both human culture and nature at large, and across time into the future. When we disregard the intrinsic value of nature in our value assessments, focusing instead only on the instrumental and economic value of nature as a package of material resources, we fail to fully appreciate its beauty and we do not develop bioempathy. As a consequence, we will be less motivated to be good citizens in the biotic community. For example, consider the prospect of a gigantic gold mine within three miles of the border of Yellowstone National Park, which would destroy a significant part of the natural beauty of the Park that its establishment was supposed to protect.1 The mine would not only be an unsightly spectacle, but would pose a significant pollution risk to the Lamar and Yellowstone river systems from mercury and other heavy metals, 1A

gold mining company has discovered what could be the largest American deposit in decades, but its proximity to Yellowstone National Park has regional environmentalists braced for a fight. Crown Butte Mines of Billings, Mont., was to dig one underground and two open-pit mines at the New World Mining District just north of Cooke City, Mont. The site is about 2.5 miles north of the park’s northeast corner and another 2.5 miles from the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Crown Butte estimates it will mine about 4.2 million tons of ore, with each ton yielding 0.4 ounces of gold. At current prices hovering near $350 an ounce, that could mean a production of more than $500 million, not including silver and copper produced on the site. (Deseret News, Sept. 22, 1992. https://www.deseretnews.com/article/184520/ MINING-COMPANY-DISCOVERS-BIG-GOLD-DEPOSIT.html.

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which would in turn harm the native plants and animals of the Park, as well as people living far downstream. (Heavy metals tend to bio-accumulate in the food chain.) There would be significant light, dust and noise pollution from the operations of the mine too, plus the displacement of many animals that live in the surrounding forests and wilderness areas. Leaving aside how such a mine might affect the economy of nearby towns by discouraging tourism, development of a gold mine right on the edge of Yellowstone National Park would sacrifice important natural values for the largely artificial and illusory value of gold jewelry. Regardless of how much money certain people might make from such a mine—from the mine owners down to the jewelry sellers—and regardless of the fact that gold has unique and useful properties—it is malleable, is an excellent electrical conductor, etc.—it is fair to ask whether the sacrifice would be worth the gain. How can this be decided and who is in the best position to decide correctly? Somehow, we must weigh the values to be gained against those that will be put at risk by such a mine. How should we go about doing this? Money can be counted; beauty in its multifarious forms cannot. In order to make a just assessment, we must consider not only the value of the gold to be obtained, but all of the “externalities” of the mining operation as well, many of which cannot reasonably be assigned a cost. This will include lasting damage to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and its biota, as well as to human beings (including future human beings) who will be deprived of the opportunity to experience a wild ecosystem in all its glory. Would the sacrifice be worth it? It is up to us to decide which is worth more, nature as it is, or nature as resource. But such a decision cannot always be reliably made in the abstract. In this case, a visit of several days to the Lamar River Valley in Yellowstone National Park would greatly enhance one’s appreciation of the natural values at stake by fostering bioempathy. When nature is heedlessly commodified, as when a living ecosystem is “transmuted” into gold, its intrinsic value is irretrievably lost. It is then regarded only as a resource and its value is determined solely by market forces. Furthermore, when an economic system depends upon endless cycles of growth (more resource expropriation  more commodities  demand for more consumers, and so on), as the prevailing system does, the result is bound to be a concomitant increase in social, economic and ecological injustice. In order to be good citizens in the biotic community, we must resist the tendency to value nature strictly as a package of commodities. Our future and the future of our fellow creatures depend on it.

References Callicott, J.B. 1987. “Foreword” (unpublished foreword to A Sand County Almanac). In Companion to A Sand County Almanac, ed. Baird Callicott, J., 282. University of Wisconsin Press. Jeffers, R. 1934. Letter to sister Mary James power (1 October 1934); published. In The wild god of the world: an anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), ed. Albert Gelpi, 189. Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. Middleton, A. 2014. The New York times.

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Moore, G.E. 1903. Principia Ethica. Cambridge at the University Press. Soulé, M.E. 1985. What is conservation biology? BioScience 35: 11, The Biological Diversity Crisis, pp. 727–734. Stroud, B. 2000. The quest for reality: subjectivism and the metaphysics of color. New York and Oxford University Press.