Trumpeter (1991)

ISSN: 0832-6193

Non-Anthropocentrism in a Thoroughly Anthropocentrized World

Anthony Weston
Trumpeter

Introduction

We know that anthropocentrism motivates anthropocentric practices and institutions..1. The reverse is also true, although less often recognized. The feedback from even such an obvious social development as the increasing concentration of humans in exclusively human environments may underwrite and inscribe anthropocentrism at least as insistently as anthropocentrism in turn underwrites and inscribes that "humanization." The prevailing values arise within a world that is profoundly and beguilingly anthropocentrized. It is surely no surprise that they give philosophical expression to anthropocentrism.

But these very interconnections make the position of non-anthropocentrism particularly difficult — or so, anyway, I will argue. We know that in the largely urbanized and technological environment where most of our philosophical discussions take place, non-anthropocentrism almost always remains merely an abstract, philosophical position. Academic philosophers (and I write as one) seem to take it for granted that we can nonetheless think and speak about it clearly, even in sealed seminar rooms between jaunts on the freeway. But can we actually do so? Does not our own ecological perspective itself, systematically applied, suggest that human thought must be understood as more limited to and profoundly constituted by its "environments" — in this case, profoundly anthropocentrized "environments?" We do know, or suspect, that a genuine non-anthropocentrism has been instantiated in other cultures and alternative practices. But they are also cultures and practices that themselves stand at a huge and perhaps unbridgeable distance from the world within which we are trying to envision them. Once again, then, mightn't we be in the strange position of attempting to explicate a sort of ethics of which only the vaguest outlines can emerge, for us, now?

To answer these questions requires that we reflect on the "ecology" of environmental ethics itself. This essay does not advance some new non-anthropocentric ethic that somehow avoids these difficulties. It does not appeal to a way of knowing somehow transcending the cultural practices and institutions to which I want to point. We do have very real intuitions of other ways. Nonetheless I suspect, they must remain radically underdeveloped, barely articulable and always marginal, until we begin to develop a corresponding set of practices. The necessary philosophical language to speak of them itself waits upon a new sort of practice. The non-anthropocentric project in philosophical ethics therefore must be approached with great modesty and circumspection, and our philosophical formulations are best advised to remain quite provisional — more provisional than they sometimes have been! — for a long time to come. But this should not necessarily be a discouraging or disempowering conclusion. On the contrary, I believe that it points toward a different and deeply rewarding kind of project: reconstituting the sorts of relationships and environments that have been destroyed. We need to deanthropocentrize the world rather than, first and foremost, to develop and systematize non-anthropocentrism — for world and thought co-evolve. We can only create an appropriate non-anthropocentrism as we begin to build a progressively less anthropocentric world.

The Making of Anthropocentrism

Here and now, the anthropocentrized world shapes our most basic terms and frames of reference, even the philosophical questions to which non-anthropocentrism itself is supposed to be an answer. One of the most basic questions of environmental ethics, for example, is supposed to be whether "we" should open the gates of moral considerability to "other" animals, and to rivers and mountains, etc. But consider how historically and culturally peculiar that "we" actually is. Historically the "we" hardly ever even included all humans. For the Greeks "we" meant the city, or at most Greece. Correspondingly, as we know, many native peoples used the term "people" to refer only to themselves. At the same time, the "we" often crossed species lines. Mary Midgley emphasizes that almost all of the ancient life patterns are "mixed communities" of humans and an enormous variety of other creatures, from dogs (our relation to whom she calls "symbiotic"), to reindeer, weasels, elephants, shags, horses, pigs, etc. — and in genuinely social, two-way relationships..2.

Of course there are sweeping philosophical dynamics that contributed to the rise of an anthropocentric ethic. Yet one crucial overlooked factor is surely the changing human environment itself..3. Looked at ecologically, the increasingly anthropocentric constitution of the "we" is in large part a consequence of the growing isolation of humans from any open-ended encounter with other lifeforms, an isolation that for many of us is now nearly complete. That isolation in turn is a consequence of the relentless humanization of nearly all environments and the increasing concentration of humans in the mostly relentlessly humanized of them.

Consider even the academic offices and seminar rooms in which we talk and think about these matters. No animals are allowed in my building, and even children are rare. The best that can be said for it is that the windows open. Given this kind of setting, it is not surprising that only adult, "rational"/discursive, human creatures stand out for ethical philosophy. Once again, of course, that way of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world owes something to a pre-existing notion of who "we" are. Here I only want to stress that the reverse is also true, and at least equally significant: our notion of the "we" is partly constituted and is surely sustained and reinforced by the character of our living and working spaces themselves.

"We" include no animals, either: that is, no other animals. Indeed, the modern category of "animal" is being systematically reconstructed. Domestication and genetic manipulation have become fine arts, and their effects are pervasive. Breeding for the most efficient meat production is so advanced that Frank Perdue's chickens are apparently no longer even capable of walking, so rapidly do their bodies overgrow their legs. Docility is also systematically selected for. Most drastically, the actual conditions under which other animals are made to live cripple any sociability, competence, or even minimal physical abilities on the part of those animals. The point then is not so much that this crippling is routinely covered up or denied by the producers, but rather that this kind of "production" itself turns the animals into just what the stereotypes imagine them: incompetent, stupid, unsociable, slothful. Soon even to think "animal" will invoke only the radically remade and reduced creatures of factory farm or zoo, or at best the also-problematic "pet."

A similar kind of anthropocentrization occurs with natural places. Again wildness and difference are systematically eradicated. The land itself is being turned into something that simply mirrors and reflects and serves humans. Again, this point is certainly not new. But it has an edge that we must see more clearly. No doubt it is true that our exploitation of the land reveals an anthropocentric attitude toward it. But that very same exploitation also creates and reinforces anthropocentric attitudes. For Heidegger a power station itself can turn a river into a water power supplier. Technology itself transforms the world into "standing reserve.".4. It is not that the turn has first to be made in thought and only later in "the world." Again, anthropocentrism coevolves with an anthropocentrized world.

Of course humans have always appropriated land for homes, farms, etc. But the traditional patterns always also allowed a space for wildness, indeed lived within it. Beyond the city walls lay unpredictable encounters with wild things, including other humans. Hans Peter Duerr argues that for the medievals the boundary between wilderness and civilization was permeable and often-crossed, like a low fence..5. In the country, at least, invitations to the wild lay at every turn. Strange animals roamed there, and at night the vast panorama of the skies opened up. Even the blossoms of the yew tree under which one might fall asleep were mild hallucinogens. An afternoon's nap might turn into a trip to the Venus Mountain. But now the animals the yews and the vastness of the night are gone, and the Venusberg is the stuff only of opera. Sometimes the wild is deliberately eradicated, as for example when the early Christians deliberately chopped down the ancient world's sacred groves. The wild potentials that remain are pushed behind what Duerr describes as a solid, steep prison wall. Tom Birch describes wildness as "incarcerated," not just physically isolated and violated, but also conceptually confined behind definitions of its utility that exclude the spontaneity and also the radical challenge of the wild..6. How could "wild" philosophy nonetheless stay free?

The Anthropocentrized Agenda of Environmental Ethics

It is not merely that the anthropocentrized world inclines its inhabitants toward anthropocentric philosophies rather than other possible views. Anthropocentrization also defines the terms according to which any alternative view might emerge, the expectations in terms of which it must be defended, and the sorts of persuasive appeals that it can make. In fact, I now want to argue, the anthropocentrized word closes out or distorts almost all philosophical alternatives to anthropocentrism, thus narrowly restricting the agenda for allowable challenge, and marginalizing all other possibilities.

In a provocative challenge, Jim Cheney has argued that a certain kind of radical environmentalism has been tempted into a "Neostoic" philosophy — an identification with Nature on the level of the universe as a whole — because Neostoicism offers a way of identifying with nature without actually giving up control. "Wholeness, health, and connectedness" are the motivators, says Cheney but they are sought and achieved through metaphysics: thus this view — he calls it "Ecosophy S" — achieves the "superstructure," as it were, of identification, but in fact "alienation" remains.

[E]xperience [of the world] is at one remove; it is not so much experience as it is an alternative to experience which — grounded ... in the impersonal, authoritarian voice of metaphysics — is safe, insulated, alienated..7.

The appeal to Neostoic metaphysics becomes a kind of philosophical substitute for "real encounter" with wild Nature.

I agree with Cheney that the level of abstraction in some kinds of environmental philosophy is unfortunately high, and that it carries a strange sense of disconnection for a kind of philosophizing that takes itself to be speaking for real connection. But, given the argument above, I might describe the psychodymanics rather differently. The experiences for which "Ecosophy S" is trying to speak are inevitably marginalized in a thoroughly anthropocentrized culture. They are simply not accessible to most people or even understandable to many. Wild experience may actually be the real starting-point for "Ecosophy S," then, but there are only a few, ritualized and hackneyed ways to actually speak for it in a culture that does not share it. Thus a radical environmental philosophy is driven to abstraction. It is not escapism but a kind of resignation. The driving force is not even so much that most people expect ethics to appeal to principles, to speak abstractly (although this is also true). Rather, it is that otherwise most people, including many converts to non-anthropocentrism, would have no idea what non-anthropocentrists could possibly be talking about. Things are now so bad that vaguest extension of human ethical terms to Nature is the only way we have to make natural values seem comprehensible.

A related issue is the alleged "sentimentality" of, especially, the attempt to speak for other animals. I have spoken of the remaking of animals. One effect of factory farming chickens or veal calves, or of using physically restrained chimps for drug experiments, is to terrorize, cripple, and debase the animals to the point that the pitiful creatures that result do in fact seem to be utterly implausible candidates for anything but human "use." But then people who work with those animals may indeed find it impossible to feel any serious concern for them. People who speak up for them will indeed seem to be speaking sentimentally, and also may in fact know the animals less well. After all, we are not just speaking up against the treatment of particular animals now, but also and perhaps most fundamentally against the debasement of the species: the refusal to honour the autonomous potential of such creatures and the ultimate destruction of the very possibility of autonomy or spontaneity. Only thus can we bring into focus the deliberately undertaken process of turning certain animals into creatures who have no serious claim on us. But therefore, in a world in which that process is nonetheless a fait accompli, we are left to speak for what might have been, not so much against the suffering and violation of this particular animal but for a vision of an appropriate life for this kind of animal — and, again, some non-industrialized creature, not bred for the factory farm. Inevitably it is a matter of vision, speculation, sentiment, horror.

Other animals are first turned into radically subordinate begins, in the end "machines," so that the old ways of speaking for them (or the old lack of a need to "speak for" them in the first place, since in at least some ways they could speak for themselves) vanishes, and we are left with only indirect ways of speaking, speculative and "nostalgic." Then those ways of speaking too are driven toward more and more general and perhaps also "principled" statements, carrying less and less actual force and invoke a set of possibilities at a greater and greater distance. Thus one might pessimistically see the appeal to animal "right," in particular, as the last line of defense for many animals, rather than the dawning of a new age. And, again, it is a tragically weak last line of defense in a world where domestication and factory farming leave so few animals even barely plausible candidates for rights. I have argued elsewhere that even the philosophical appeal to the "intrinsic value" of Nature might be seen as a similarly desperate rhetorical device, rather than the inauguration of a new relation between humans and the nonhuman world..8. Perhaps the urgency with which intrinsic value is now so liberally spread around is only another sign that the instrumentalization of the world has reached a fever pitch.

Consider finally the apparently simple matter of what sorts of criticism are generally regarded as "responsible" and what sorts of alternatives are generally regarded as "realistic." I want to suggest that the anthropocentrized world, in fact the product of an absolutely immense project of world-reconstruction that has reached a kind of frenzy in the modern age, has become simply the taken-for-granted reference-point for what is "real," for what must be accepted by any responsible criticism. The anthropocentrized world defines the very limits of intelligent discourse, thus constraining and reshaping the discourse we attempt.

The simplest example: for at least the last twenty years of my life, I have hardly ever been out of earshot of the noise of some internal combustion engine for more than a few hours at a time. At any moment we merely need to raise our heads to listen for a moment, and the familiar growls and drones are there. This absolute pervasiveness of internal combustion engines is of course utterly new, all of it confined to the last century and most to the last generation. The environmental consequences are staggering, the long-term effects of the constant noise on "mental health" are clearly worrisome, etc. And yet all of this has so thoroughly embedded itself in our lives that even the mildest proposals to restrict internal combustion engines, to close off certain areas to airplanes or cars or simply to make it possible to bicycle to work without fearing for life or limb, have an air of the almost impossibly radical about them. The suddenly-transmuted world, so fantastic even fifty years ago, now just as suddenly defines the very limits of imagination.

Philosophy is co-opted just as effectively. Many of our colleagues take a careful, neutral, skeptical style as a point of pride. But in actual practice this style is only careful, neutral, skeptical in certain directions. Suggest anything different, and it all comes into play. The project of going beyond anthropocentrism looks wild, incautious, intellectually over-excited, and one is invited with varying degrees of alarm to explore the ways in which we might gerrymander a somewhat more environmentally sensitive ethic that doesn’t “go so far” as to actually contemplate ethical connections to the nonhuman world. Meanwhile, however, anthropocentrism itself is almost never scrutinized in the same way. Is anthropocentrism in fact only an appropriately cautious, natural fallback position for a skeptical mind who would prefer to “wait and see” about the more “radical” possibilities? Or mightn’t it strike one as just a little bizarre for an human ethical system systematically to debase every other living thing on the planet –when it notices them at all?

Some environmentalists have tried to reclaim words like "conservative" for themselves while pinning "radical" on the other side, a strategy no doubt worth trying. But I am more concerned with the prior and more common problem that this "other side" very seldom emerges as a side at all. The usual categories presuppose a vision of "the world" that is ratified below the level of consciousness by the omnipresence of noise, trash on the beaches and jet trails in the sunset, the bodies of animals available for our consumption at every turn. Non-anthropocentric criticism then truly is "unrealistic," not merely because anthropocentrism defines the "realistic," but because "reality" itself is now so thoroughly anthropocentrized.

First Stages the Struggle Toward Non-Anthropocentrism

The philosophical critique of anthropocentrism, then, barely touches the core of the present problem: the world that anthropocentrism rationalizes and reflects. It is no surprise therefore that non-anthropocentrism has won the barest toehold even in philosophy, and that, even for the sympathetic, the actual philosophical forms into which non-anthropocentrism has struggled often prove unpersuasive, or too weak, or too, well, rational. But a very different kind of project may instead be required of us; and this too has been struggling to find expression in non-anthropocentric philosophical work.

I have argued that we have so thoroughly reconstructed the other animals, for instance, and so efficiently closed ourselves off from them, that we hardly have any idea of what it would be to actually relate to them in an open-ended sort of way. But then the actual task before us is to begin to reconstitute an open-ended relationship, discovering its appropriate ethic in the process. We should not suppose that we could construct a systematic non-anthropocentrism in the privacy of our studies or seminar rooms at all. Instead we must take up more systematically the entire question of the constitution of relationship in the first place..9. Cheney writes, for instance, that

What must be explored are the necessary conditions..for the emergence of healthy voices.... The real work is in providing a context, a practice, in which conversation with coyote [e.g.] is made possible. The question is whether ecological consciousness is to function for us as a totalizing consciousness which, while praising diversity in nature, often seems quite insistent on listening to only one voice..., or whether...primacy will be given to the voices which emerge in ...genuine encounter..10.

By making a space or "providing a context" for "genuine encounter," again, we not only begin to constitute (or re-constitute) relationships that do not yet exist — Cheney's point — but we also begin, in the only real way possible, to establish the preliminaries for a fully-fleshed non-anthropocentric ethic.

Just recognizing how very resistant we are to "genuine encounter" — indeed cleverly and almost instinctively resistant — is a necessary first step. Unimpressed by personal encounters or by musicians who sing with the whales,.11. for example, we are often unduly impressed by scientific arguments. But this sort of argument takes seriously the demand to show that other animals can be companions, when precisely that demand already represents a way of closing ourselves off from the creatures in question (right: in question). Too often, even when they study animals whole, scientists approach animals only from a posture of careful neutrality about whether or not, as one dolphin researcher put it, "there's somebody in there." Human beings trip over their feet when treated with such distance and skepticism, and there is no reason to expect other animals to do any better, especially when they are exquisitely more sensitive to the affective environment than we are. Not to mention that being "in there" is exactly what fully sensed creatures are not, we are "out here," alive in a rich and responsive world..12. We must begin to explore what it would mean to relate to them in kind.

Most of us struggling toward non-anthropocentrism believe that "encounter" is possible as well with natural places, rock formations or rivers or pine-covered dunes. But here too, now, the onus lies upon us to make the space for such encounters to occur, without trying to predetermine their shape. Here too, then, the first moment of the ethical relation we must constitute is not an attempt to deduce a non-anthropocentric ethic . priori, as if we had enough "evidence" to answer such a question. Instead the first moment must be a reaching out, opening the possibility of being touched rather than touching, whatever — we can hardly yet say — might eventuate. Suppose for example that "Old Faithful," still scintillating under coloured lights and barely beyond the stage at which the Park Service added soap to the waters to make sure the eruptions came off on schedule, might someday have to be approached only as the Indians once did: after elaborate fasts and ceremonies, perhaps first daring to come near only in dreams, only then in person, purified and alone, after days of hiking through the bubbling earth and nights sleepless for the scent of grizzly bear. The name itself would have to change; certainly our interventions to force "faithfulness" must end. Or again: the real problem with Ronald Reagan's notorious remark that "If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all" is not most fundamentally his refusal to recognize nonhuman intrinsic value, or the ecological absurdity of fetishizing a particular tree, but the simple fact that, like almost all of the rest of us, he never really "saw" even one redwood tree: that is, never truly experienced it in any open-ended way. Suppose that, to speak for the redwoods, we actually allowed ourselves to re-experience, to re-approach, the trees themselves. Then, after perhaps lifetimes of intimacy, we might be entitled to say something about what kind of relationship is possible and what ethical connection might or might not be demanded. Right now we are hardly able to begin to say.

De-Anthropocentrizing the World

The real work, says Cheney, is to create a context within which "genuine encounter" becomes possible. The task is to begin to reconstitute an open-ended relation to Nature; to deanthropocentrize the world enough to allow a genuine non-anthropocentrism to begin to emerge. Let me stress that I do not mean that "a genuine non-anthropocentrism" is somehow already there, ready to emerge, and that all we need to do is to somehow open up to it. No doubt that is a possible view, but it is not mine. It is not that "Old Faithful" has been whispering its real name to us all along, and we just need to begin to listen. I see the task more pragmatically, as a kind of dialogic or co-evolutionary experiment in which we too participate. The task of "connecting," on this view, is not to make ourselves still, though it certainly is to quiet down.

For just one illustration, consider the quite literal possibility of setting aside certain places as quiet zones: places where automobile engines and lawnmowers and low-flying airplanes are not allowed. Again, the proposal is not to totally exclude all human activity. Indeed it would be crucial for people to actually live in such places. But they would leave their power tools and stereos and automobiles somewhere else. The aim would be appropriately modest too: simply to make it possible to hear the birds and the winds, and to live in the silence. If bright outside lights were also banned, one could see the stars at night and feel the slow pulsations of the light over the seasons.

One imagines progressively differently designed houses, a life slowly edging back toward embeddedness in natural places, quiet talks in the gardens and festivals at moonrise. Instead of another ten thousand suburban developments all the same, in short, a little creative zoning could make space for increasingly divergent styles: experiments in recycling and energy self-sufficiency, for example; or mixed communities of humans and other species, perhaps with the intention of opening up inter-species communication or at any rate serious co-inhabitation; or "ecosteries" on the model of the old monasteries,.13. or other possibilities not yet even imagined.

This is intentionally a modest example: something achievable, "green," close to home, and of course in places already underway. If it seems utopian all the same, consider that, as I have argued, a certain appearance of unrealism on these matters is almost necessary. Reflect also that the simple quietness evoked here was the more or less universal condition of rural life until quite recently. Unplug our outside lights, reroute a few roads, and we already have a first approximation.

First approximations to "mixed communities" are possible for many of us already. I too spend the academic year in the rigorously humanized environments already described. But every spring, when I begin to garden, my life takes on a different shape. The "we," for instance, that in my office seems to include only humans, now changes. "We" are now my co-gardeners and beneficiaries — the plants themselves, obviously; the neighbour who plows and advises, the friends and soup kitchen that get the extra cucumbers and tomatoes, the raccoons who rummage in the compost pile, the horses whose manure fertilizes, the insects who make their homes among the vegetables and consume their more destructive cousins. The "them" are the various threats: other plants and insects, the groundhogs and deer that take more than they need or destroy more than they get, the kid down the hill (quite human) who lobs baseballs into the corn. Species lines do not determine my allegiances here; rather, my alliance is to one multi-species community and against various others who emerge as invaders and disrupters. One small step for a man, one fairly significant transformation of consciousness. But gardening is available to most of us now, and there is no reason that a "green" politics could not insist upon making it available to all.

By taking the restructuring of human communities as an illustration I do not mean to exclude other obviously vital activities, such as preserving the wilderness. Certainly the wild places that remain to us should be protected. For some places and some species even the near-total exclusion of humans may be necessary. Nonetheless, the project of developing a non-anthropocentric ethic, now conceived as making a space for the co-evolution of a less anthropocentric ethic within a less anthropocentrized world, does redirect our main focus toward the points of interaction, encounter, rather than separation. Certainly the aim is not to push humans out of the picture entirely, but rather to open up the possibility of relation between humans and the rest of Nature. We need to pay much more attention to places where humans and other creatures, honoured in their wildness and potential relatedness, can come together, perhaps warily but at least openly.

Older traditions of "naturalist" writing already offer a set of categories for thinking about such places..14. More recently, Wendell Berry takes up similar questions in his essay "Getting Along with Nature." After arguing that the opposition between "purely natural" and "purely human" environments is both chimerical and unappealing — we would not want to live in either, even if we could — Berry goes on to discuss what he calls "the phenomenon of edge or margin, that we know to be one of the powerful attractions of a diversified landscape, both to wildlife and to humans." "Margins" are places where domesticity and wildness meet. Mowing his small hayfield with a team of horses, Berry encounters a hawk who lands quite close to him, watching carefully but without fear. The hawk comes, he says,

because of the conjunction of the small pasture and its wooded borders, of open hunting ground and the security of trees.... The human eye itself seems drawn to such margins, hungering for the difference made in the countryside by a hedgy fencerow, a stream, or a grove of trees. These margins are biologically rich, the meeting of two kinds of habitat....15.

The hawk would not have come, he says, if the field had been larger, or if there had been no trees, or if he had been plowing with a tractor. Encounter is a fragile thing, and we need to pay careful attention to its preconditions, just as it is itself a precondition for the emergence of non-anthropocentrism in turn.

There are many kinds of "margins." Jim Nollman, speaking of the seashore, reminds us that the aborigine shamans knew how to call and speak with the dolphins. Furthermore, even this attention to "margins" is only one instance of what it might mean to try to make space for "genuine encounter." For now, though, the point is that these thoughts open up a realm of ethics very different from the familiar philosophical arguments and abstractions. It is not to deny that certain arguments and abstractions are still necessary. But it is to suggest that, in the world as we know it, they tend to work in an almost complete vacuum. Their air of unreality is no surprise. To create or restore a world in which they are grounded and real is our desperate but necessary task.

Notes

1. I am distinguishing "anthropocentrism," as a philosophical position issuing in an ethics, from the practices and institutions in which it is embodied; likewise for "non-anthropocentrism."

2. Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 118.

3. A general model for what I am calling an "ecological" approach to understanding the varieties of anthropocentric philosophy may be found in Paul Shepard's Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982).

4. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in David Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: The Basic Writings (Harper, 1977), pp.296-7.

5. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization (Blackwell, 1985), 0. 30.

6. Tom Birch, "The Incarceration of Wilderness," Environmental Ethics 12:1 (Spring 1990).

7. Jim Cheney, "The Neostoicism of Radical Environmentalism," Environmental Ethics 11:4 (Winter, 1989), p. 311.

8. In my essay "Beyond Intrinsic Value," Environmental Ethics 7:4 (1985) 321-339, and in "Intrinsic Valueó in Nature," in preparation.

9. One of the exciting developments in contemporary ethics is the emergence of the theme of relationship, especially in feminist work. See, for example, Jessica Benjamin, "A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space," in Teresa De Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Indiana University Press, 1986); Jim Cheney, "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology," Environmental Ethics 9:2 (1987), 115-45; and a number of the essays in Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Rowmaî anä Littlefield 1987).

10(r) Cheney "Thà Neostoicisí oæ Radicaì Environmentalism, p(r) 319.

11. See Jim Nollman, Dolphin Dreamtime (Harper and Row, 1987), earlier titled Animal Dreaming.

12. I am greatly indebted to David Abram's eloquent persistence on this theme.

13. Alan Drengson, "The Ecostery Foundation of North America: Statement of Philosophy," The Trumpeter 7:1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 12-16.

14. See, for instance, Rene Dubos, The Wooing of Earth (Scribner's, 1980) and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford University Press, 1964).

15. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p.