Erazim Koh_k is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University and Charles University in Prague. He is the author of the classic work in ecophilosophy, The Embers and the Stars (University of Chicago Press, 1984) and other books in phenomenology. This article is excerpted from "ObO(c,_)an a pr_roda," Lidov_ noviny and "Philosophische kologie nach 20 Jahren," in press.
"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." So, at least, we say, though in fact we have, for the most part, acted as if we owned it. Not always: when we set about bombing a particular segment of it into a parking lot, we act as if we didn't care who owned it. The Earth is the Lord's? and Christ will come again? Wonder what He will say when He sees the mess we have made
This much, at least, is clear. We cannot go on as we are going. We have set a course for self-destruction and we are picking up momentum. When the first report of the Club of Rome made that obvious, a great many people who profited from the destruction of the environment hastened to assure us that there really is no cause for concern. Recycling and benign technology will solve the problem. We can go on as we have been going in the quest of "prosperity," here understood as steadily rising individual consumption for the privileged one-fifth of the world's population. We can overstuff, we can squander, we can waste - and congratulate ourselves that our consumption is fueling the economy and contributing to growth - as long as we recycle our beer cans and have catalytic converters on even more powerful cars.
Today that is too obviously a lie. Technological ecology - systematic substitution of eco-friendly technologies for polluting ones, solar power for nuclear - is very much to be desired, in fact it is essential to survival, but it is not a solution. Ultimately our problem is not inadequate technology - though that certainly is a problem - but our civilizational strategy of more! A policy of open-ended expansion of consumption on a finite earth cannot but lead to disaster. If humankind is to survive upon this Earth, indeed, if this Earth is to survive as we know it, we need not just an alternative technology but an alternative conception of what being human is all about. The strategy which the opinion-makers commend to us, and most of humankind eagerly accepts - the strategy of ever more - clearly represents a self-destructive behavior. Every added car, every added appliance is another nail in humankind's coffin.
Why, though, does humankind persist in exhibiting self-destructive behavior? It is not the first time. Humans persisted in perfecting weapons of mass destruction even after it became clear that in a nuclear war there would certainly be no winners and possibly no survivors. Less dramatically, but no less drastically, the consumption of cigarettes continued to rise, quite rapidly, even after it became well known that there is a link between smoking and lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and even birth defects. Today it is no less clear that rising consumption is rapidly rendering this planet uninhabitable, yet, like the smokers of the 1950s, we persist. Why?
The Hebrew-Christian tradition offers an explanatory paradigm: The problem is not that the good spirit is weighted down by a bad body, as the Egyptians thought. Nor is it that humans and all the creation are made up of two equally basic elements, one good, the other bad, as the Manicheans taught. God creates humans and all the creation is good. All that God creates is necessarily good but it is not self-sufficient. Humans need the constant sustenance of God's grace. Once they cut themselves off from God, they grow dry and brittle as a plant without water; they become tense, afraid, and angry - and strike out at themselves and others. If traditional terminology bothers you, call it "alienation." Humans grow weak and do harm because they have become alienated, cut off from the ground of their being.
That is the paradigm which philosophical ecology uses: humans do harm to their world, humans destroy the environment on which they depend, because they have become estranged from it, cut off from the world which is still God's not "Man's." They surround themselves with an artificial world of their own making. In the urban world of artifacts and constructs they fall prey to the illusion that they are the source of all worth, the referent of all meaning because, in one sense, it is so. Cars, computers, cans, have no life of their own: they are made by humans to serve humans. It is an illusion, to be sure, since humans bear nature's rhythm in their bodies, but it can be a convincing illusion. If humans are to rediscover the order and rhythm of the created world, they need to recover the world of living nature, of trees, of animals, of the good earth, of the glowing embers mirroring the distant stars.
Environmentalism, committed to saving the wounded earth, draws its inspiration from this basic insight. Humans drawn to it tend to turn their back on the world of artifacts, on the pursuit of prosperity at any cost. For them the goal is not "the Good of Man" but the welfare of all of God's creation, of all life in all its multiplicity and harmony. To them, the human is not the Master but one of the dwellers of this earth, seeking a place within its order. The paradigm is clear: if humans have becomes estranged from living nature, the strategy need be one of regaining contact with it. It is forester's ecology, seeking to return to nature in the most tangible sense of that word.
Nature, though, is also the nature we bear within. Thinkers who tend to identify loosely with deep ecology see the basic estrangement not as one between humans and the rest of the created world but between the superficial dimensions of our humanity and the depth of our being. Borrowing a paradigm from C. G. Jung, they see all life through the millennia as one reality, much as Jung's collective unconscious. Individual beings are but offshoots or outcroppings of that collective depth. So a woodchuck or a porcupine is not an autonomous being but one momentary manifestation of their species and ultimately all life. So is each individual human consciousness.
The problem, according to the "deep" ecologists, is that brittle human reason has become estranged from its own emotional and instinctual depth. Humans can kill and destroy nature because they think only with their alienated reason, blind to the emotion and intuition that link them to all life. Something within us cries out at the death of a tree, but we force ourselves to "think rationally," to "stop being sentimental" - it is, after all, for the good of humanity, and humans are a higher species. If, with the Devil, they choose to quote Scripture, they will insist that humans have been "given dominion over" all other beings - and, for them, that settles it.
Against such insensitive, domineering folly the deep ecologists seek to "think like a mountain," not in Aldo Leopold's original sense of choosing for the good of all life but in the sense of subordinating our domineering, masculine reason to the deep, pre-rational and feminine aspect of our nature. In recovering the collective depth of our being, meditation may be of more use than forestry, yoga more than catalytic converters. Undoing ecological damage and generating a sustainable mode of being human will take place almost by the wayside as humankind rediscovers the pre-rational collective identity of all life.
A great deal can be said for the deep ecological sensitivity for the communion of all beings. Truly, until humans give up the pretensions of their superiority there is little hope that they can re-establish a harmony of nature and a sustainable mode of being human. Still, there is reason to hesitate. Is it enough to think like a mountain? Humans are no higher beings than wolves or porcupines and have no greater claim upon the Earth's resources than they. Still, humans are different. The wolves have no moral obligation to limit their catch when the number of prairie dogs start dropping perilously close to survival level. Nature will take care of it. With dropping numbers of prairie dogs, wolves will catch less and their numbers will in turn go down giving the prairie dogs a chance to recuperate. With humans it is otherwise. When their prey start nearing extinction - say a particular type of fish - humans construct a factory ship that sweeps through the ocean like a vacuum cleaner, assuring sustained yields down to the point of that species' extinction.
Humans cannot abolish nature's rules any more than they can suspend the law of gravity. However, as in the case of the Tower of Babel, New York City or factory trawlers, they can block its operation to the point of disaster. Nature will not save humans from their folly, as it will the wolves. Humans have a moral obligation to limit their own predation. They are not different in the sense of being exempt from reality. They are different in having the obligation of imposing their own reality limits.
Notoriously, they - we - do not. Our most basic alienation is our estrangement from our own moral responsibility. It is crucial for humans to rediscover the world of living nature around us because a sensitivity to the presence of God in nature is essential for a sensitivity to the presence of God in history. We can recognize that Jesus is the Christ, not just another guru, when we are aware of the dimension of the Holy - that The Earth is the Lord's. The very idea of Christ, Im-anu-el, makes little sense in the context of god-empty reality, conceived of as an accidental product of matter in mechanical motion. It is important to break out of the solipsism of the "me-generation," to recover the we of our shared being. But it is not at all clear that one can best overcome narcissism by the kind of preoccupation with one's own emotions - or worse still, "feelings" - that marks much of deep ecology. We are, after all, told to seek first the Kingdom. In fact, experience suggests that we receive our true selves in seeking God and responding to God's call, not in seeking our precious selves. Still, deep ecology has something to offer in its awareness of the unity and solidarity of life. Ultimately, though, it may well be moral ecology that is most important: accepting the responsibility for our freedom.
To claim that only a god could still save us is surely true, but it is also, in traditional terms, the venial sin of audacious reliance on God's grace. A retreat to Walden Pond or Sharon Clearing is indispensable to finding one's soul in God's world. Hearing God's call in the stillness of the soul can be profoundly restorative, but ultimately it is accepting our responsibility that makes this all possible. The fundamental alienation at the root of the ecological crisis is the crisis of responsibility. Yes, only god can save us - that is not exactly news. God has already done so. Because God has, though, we need to ask, what does the Lord require of me?
With that, we have come somewhat of a full circle. We know what the Lord requires of us: Seek ye first the Kingdom, and all else will be added to you. At the root of the ecological crisis is the reversal of that dictum. For centuries, we have sought first all else - higher consumption - assuming that if we can grab everything, salvation will be added to us: if we can amass cars and videos and computers, happiness will happen. It is time to try it the way the Scripture tells us, to seek to serve God in the harmony of God's creation, confident that if we do, God will take care of our salvation. For, come to think of it, God already has.
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