This post is part two of what may eventually be three posts about the ideas of the deep green movement. Part one can be found here.
In my last post, I talked about what deep green is and how I feel about its analysis of our environmental situation. Now, I want to talk about some issues I’m having trouble reconciling with deep green philosophy. I should add that I’m relatively new to deep green, and by no means have I done an exhaustive search of available writings on the topic. So it’s definitely possible that the issues I bring up have been addressed by someone else.
Many people have a tendency to construct a human/nature divide. Environmentalists say that nature is good, in balance, self-sustaining. Humans are destructive, wasteful. Nature should be fenced off, designated, set aside so that we can visit it without ruining it forever. This idea underlies the language of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which says that “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Ed Abbey wanted to preserve wilderness as a spiritual refuge for man to escape the evils of civilization (and as a place from which to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government). Even non-environmentalists like to separate humans and nature. Descartes argued that animals didn’t have souls and thus couldn’t feel pain—in spite of the similarity of their physical structures, they were entirely unlike humans. The Bible gives man dominion over the earth, placing him at once as separate from and above nature.
The human/nature divide is an artificial one. For most of human history, people have lived in “wild” areas, and nature was historically a place where people got food and building materials and tons of other stuff. The idea of setting aside land as “wilderness” would have seemed foreign to most cultures that have existed before ours, and American wilderness was often made by kicking native peoples off of their lands so John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt could enjoy their scenic views of mountains unmolested.
The deep green stuff I’ve read seems to be mostly on board with this, but they draw another divide—industrial civilization versus indigenous cultures. Indigenous cultures are integrated into their landbases and able to live in a sustainable way without depleting natural resources. In contrast, industrial civilization is systematically destroying the planet.
I’m not denying the awful, horrendous destructiveness of industrial civilization, nor am I denying the existence of indigenous cultures that were able to live sustainably. But I don’t think there’s anything special and magical about non-civilized and indigenous societies. There are plenty of instances throughout human history of people who destroyed their environments via deforestation, from settlers on Easter Island thousands of years ago to indigenous people in the Andean highlands in the past few centuries. Industrial technologies have managed to dramatically accelerate the speed with which we’re able to destroy things, and I absolutely believe that the mentality of Western Civilization has a particularly unsettling zeal for conquest, pillage and plunder.
However, that doesn’t mean that indigenous cultures are automatically harmonious with nature or with each other. My pre-departure readings for Ecuador have included descriptions of the indigenous people who have traditionally lived (and often still do live) in the Amazon. Warfare between groups has been common, both to defend exclusive rights to forage in a particular area, and also to capture women to increase genetic diversity for the group. Portraying traditional indigenous cultures as uniformly harmonious, peaceful, happy, feminist or any other positive attribute strike me as a reconstruction of Rosseau’s “noble savage” concept. Throughout history, there have been cultures—indigenous and non—that have systematically depleted natural resources, and there have been cultures that have managed to live sustainably in a place over a period of time. If we want to get there as a culture, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of tough issues, get over our oil addiction, figure out how to live more locally and more integrated with our landbase. For me, that’s not the same thing as bringing down civilization.
If we accept that humans are part of nature, then we run into another problem. Deep green works that I’ve read have seemed to construct nature as a relatively static entity. Plants will return to damaged areas if given time to do so, systems will bring themselves back into balance if humans stop destroying them, but overall, nature stays relatively the same. I understand the sentiment behind this idea. I’ve written before about the detached environmental view, the scientist who points out that 99% of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct so if more species are dying off now, it’s just the natural order. The other common argument that gets thrown out is that anything humans do is natural, because we’re part of nature. If we’re stupid and kill ourselves off, it just proves that we weren’t well adapted to the earth, and anyway, the sun’s going to burn out in a few billion years, so what does it all matter anyway?
I’ve said it before, but these ideas are stupid, suicidal and self-destructive. Anyone who cares about the future of life should have a vested interest in preserving the planet in a liveable condition. Even anthropocentrists who see no intrinsic value in the existence of other species should have a vested interest in preserving clean water, productive land, un-polluted ecosystems and a climate that isn’t too hot so that future people can live and eat. So I understand why, faced with arguments like these, radical environmentalists are quick to construct nature as a permanent, fixed entity. But it’s not.
I’ve been reading a lot about evolution recently, since my study abroad program is ecology-focused and includes a trip to the Galapagos Islands. One of the books I read talked about the Galapagos finches and scientists who were studying them during a period of drought. Drought conditions dramatically altered the types of food available to the finches, such that over a single season, the average beak length of the finches changed by about a millimeter. That might not sound like much, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty significant. Evolution is a constant, ongoing process. There’s the classic example of moths in during the industrial revolution—the ones that happened to be grey started to blend in better with soot-covered buildings, so in a few generations, almost the entire population had become grey to avoid predators. When farmers in the US started spraying DDT all over everything, they quickly found that after a few seasons, bugs were becoming resistant not only to DDT, but to several similar chemical compounds. Pesticides constantly have to be changed because insects are so good at adapting quickly to new chemicals.
I don’t say any of this to defend the use of DDT. I don’t mean to suggest that animals that can’t evolve to live in the world being created by humans should die off because they’re not “fit”. But knowing the incredible dynamism that exists in nature, it’s hard for me to talk about returning nature to a former state of glory. I believe absolutely in preserving biodiversity, keeping species and ecosystems around for their own sake. I know the oil economy is a nightmare and needs to go away for so many reasons. I want people to live more harmoniously with nature, more in touch with each other, more outside, more fully. But knowing the way that humans have interacted with nature for millennia—we push, species evolve and push back—makes me reluctant to say that anything humans do to alter nature for their own benefit is bad or unnatural. I’m not talking about things like tar sands or uranium mining. I’m talking agriculture or selective land clearing to build homes. I want a world where we can live harmoniously with nature. But I don’t believe we can make that world unless we recognize that we’re neither wholly good nor inherently destructive, not separate from or above nature. Even in our hubris and arrogance, we’re still a part of the ever-evolving face of life on earth, and an honest conversation about bringing us into better balance with the rest of nature needs to start by acknowledging that fact.
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