PHI 336 Environmental Ethics

Shiva vs. Ferre

Finishing Vandana Shiva’s Making Peace with the Earth this week was a pleasure. Shiva is a fearless critic of the destructive powers that be and her advocacy of a holistic earth democracy worldview as an alternative to global capitalism, its structures, and its faulty assumptions is unencumbered by any hesitancy or painful deliberation over conceptual sticking points. Her clear articulation of real harms committed against people and the ecosystem make her call for direct action so forceful and persuasive that it’s tempting, for me at least, to abandon the tedium of academic work altogether and take her slogans to the streets. However, although I am glad to perceive growing momentum for change in the world including a drive to improve environmental practices (which Shiva highlights in her discussion of the “Voices of the 99 per cent,” starting pg. 260), we are all aware by now of the wide diversity of views on what exactly constitutes an environmental ethic. At the outset of the semester, we pretty easily dispensed with anthropocentrism as an insufficient worldview, but I think as we consider expanding the sphere of moral considerability, it is important to understand why exactly it is necessary to reach ecological holism as articulated by Shiva and not take a permanent detour into, for example, the ring of hierarchical biocentrism (diagram on p. 11 of EE text). Although Shiva doesn’t directly address these issues in Making Peace, I think I can prove the point well enough using her work as a critique of Frederick Ferre’s concept of “personalistic organicism” as he articulates it in “Persons in Nature: Toward an Applicable and Unified Environmental Ethic.”

Ferre builds his argument upon a criticism of the ethics of two authors who we have also read in this course: Aldo Leopold and Holmes Rolston III. Ferre offers praise for Leopold, but questions him on definitions of concepts from the Land Ethic including “integrity,” “stability,” and “community” based on limited human knowledge of ecology. More importantly, he argues, Leopold’s ethic disregards human needs in two ways: first, it has no answer to important human ethical questions, like whether lying is wrong. This seems to me to be basically a Mill-type argument: if nature is defined as everything, it can serve as no guide for moral standards, no arbiter of right or wrong. Secondly, Ferre says, the Land Ethic’s marginalization of human culture to the needs of the biotic community justifies exterminating humans to solve overpopulation, institution of eco-fascist regimes, etc. Ferre then juxtaposes Leopold with Rolston, who argues that separate human (social) ethics and environmental ethics are necessary. Here, Ferre quotes Rolston at length in some passages written in language that sounds like it’s directly quoted from Hobbes about how brutish nature’s “continual struggle” is “reckless” and “indifferent” to suffering, lacking in any kind of altruism or justice (EE p. 156-7). It is because these “repugnant” processes are nonetheless evolutionarily important for ecosystems that Rolston rationalizes the necessity of a separate ethics for humans that will prevent human suffering but allow gruesome survival of the fittest to continue to reign in nature. Ferre’s issue with Rolston is simply that delineating between human and nature is incoherent since humans are part of the natural system. Ferre then goes on to construct his proposed ethical system. He ascribes inherent value to all living beings, but ultimately concludes that some kind of ethical middle ground is necessary–a hierarchical sliding scale of moral values that constitutes his “personalistic organicism” and assigns the highest value to humans. This, he says, will suffice pending some scientific demonstration of heretofore unknown capacities of organisms that could “change our minds” (EE p. 160A)

“What an eminently reasonable compromise,” some readers might conclude approvingly. “Extremely dangerous thinking,” I would respond, all the more so because it is articulated by someone with apparently good intentions toward furthering environmental justice. Underlying Ferre’s argument are some extremely faulty assumptions about nature and humans’ place in it. Although he seems to advocate a definition of nature that is inclusive of human systems and denounces bifurcations of the two, his main basis for the necessity of his ethic is that it solves for situations in which human and ecosystem interests collide, with his main example being the crisis of human overpopulation. The human population crisis, though, is a manufactured problem. Shiva illustrates this very well throughout her book, especially in the chapters “Hunger by Design” and “Hunger via Corporate-Controlled Trade,” in which she offers research by her Navdanya foundation that the higher yields of bio-diverse farms prove that “small farmers can feed the world” and solve the hunger problem which has been artificially imposed by destructive monoculture and GMO industrial farming and First World demands for increased exportation of food. Ferre makes a blatantly racist characterization of the “teeming global South” but Shiva shows us what the global South really looks like–650 million small farmers in India engaged in (relatively) ecologically sustainable cultivation, with another 40 million engaged in vibrantly diverse small-scale open market trade (p. 210). Beyond the issue of population specifically, it is simply false to assume that a zero-sum tradeoff game exists between human and ecosystem interests. The interconnectedness of human and environmental health is a theme not only for Shiva, but for Wendell Berry, who in “The Body and the Earth” demonstrated in depth the interconnectedness of human societal sicknesses and ecological sicknesses and the solution they have in common: local agrarianism. When Ferre offers up Rolston’s severe characterizations of nature’s brutishness without comment, he thus implicitly endorses them and forecloses a more harmonious worldview that emphasizes the cooperative processes that do exist in nature and the accompanying ethic of caretaking that could fuse satisfaction of human needs with ecosystem maintenance.

Ferre’s second faulty assumption is derived from the ignorance argument that he makes against Leopold and returns to at the end of his essay when he leaves open the possibility that new scientific research could change his assumptions about organisms and cause him to re-evaluate his position. Although admittedly human knowledge of ecosystem processes and health is limited, as is our capacity to understand the experience of a non-human organism, I see ignorance as no justification for assumed human superiority. Here, I think Paul Taylor’s arguments against assuming human superiority are excellent. All of the theoretical underpinnings for hierarchical social systems, including Greek humanism, Cartesian dualism, and the Christian Great Chain of Being, he argues, are basically unjustifiable given a modern understanding of evolutionary history and our shared ancestry with all life. We have no reason to believe that rationality is in itself inherently good or preferable to any other way of being. I think the obvious extension of Taylor’s teleological center of life to the natural goal orientation of humans towards human goods and ends is perfectly sufficient to justify continued interest in ethical relationships within the human community and preservation of human life. Since we are already limited in our human perspective and driven toward our own self-preservation, I see absolutely no need to go Ferre’s route and attempt to claim some objective or systemic right of dominion. The proper course of action in realizing your own ignorance is humility and respect for the unknown other, not a declaration of inherent superiority.

Ferre also suggests that Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic is so lacking on the question of human ethics that it justifies eco-fascism. It is absolutely true that Leopold is brief in the way of recommendations for human cultural problems. However, no where in Leopold’s work does he make an argument for centralized or coercive measures for ecosystem planning; on the contrary, he clearly advocates for practices of local knowledge and control that are foundational concepts in the field of sustainability. Ultimately, Ferre’s advocacy of hierarchical biocentrism is an over-reaction to a set of imaginary problems that falls back into the very same ways of thinking that created our contemporary ecological problems in the first place. Unlike the danger posed to us by hypothetical environmentalist fascism, the problems of corporate fascism and eco-apartheid are all too real. Everywhere the commodification of nature is eroding people’s natural rights to life-sustaining water and food, destroying human and non-human life, and disrupting ecosystem processes. Vandana Shiva says we need “a shift in our worldview from a Cartesian-mechanistic paradigm that defines the earth as dead matter to recognizing that she is alive and vibrant, the source of all abundance and all life, that we are a part of the earth, not apart from her, that we are her children, not her masters and owners” (p. 265). I couldn’t agree more.