Rethinking  Nature: A philosophy to the rewilding

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes – I mean the Universe

                                                             (Galileo Galilei).

In 1988, Time Magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ was not a man but or even a human but earth itself. This earth has been for millennia the taken-for-granted background for all human activities. It has served as a storehouse and refuse bin. Nature is the abode of life but it is disappearing fast. Because of the impact on the world of nature, many people call the present age “the Anthropocene” coining this term to echo geological ages such as the Eocene and the Pleistocene. What they mean is that human impacts have become predominant over the whole surface of the Earth. When the degradation of the harmony between nature and humanity emerged and the sustainability of our planet earth are questioned, many eco-philosophers came forward to reinterpret the ethics in the increasing complexity, interconnectedness, and interdependence to the environment and to deal with the necessity of interdisciplinary renaissance to form and shape the new environmental ethical revolution.

Humans as the crown of creation made humans think of themselves as rulers of all and considered nature to be exploited for their well-being and forgotten the protection of nature. The changes to the relationship between humanity and nature had begun in the 16^th and 17^th century – a movement from Copernicus to Newton, from renaissance natural magic to the mechanical world view and break up of feudalism to the rise of mercantile capitalism and the nation-state. Galileo emphasized the unreality of what is not measurable and Descartes reinforced Galilean ideology and argued for the Cartesian Dualism which had given man a superior position with the superiority of thought and mind. It might have given a dominion power to humanity over the other beings and the idea of progress began to rule the world with new definition with the control, domination, manipulation, and loss of respect for nature from the part of human. The concept of progress began to see the existence of nature for the service of humankind with anthropogenic environmental degradation. People lost the holistic perspective and gave importance only to the interrelation of parts and whole. Instead of seeing everything with respect and admiration, humanity treated nature with domination and exploitation. The humans considered nature only with instrumental value than intrinsic value. The humans forgot the idea that all have values of themselves independently of humans.  In history, there was a disputing question – should we give intrinsic value (value of things as ends in themselves) to the non-human beings or only instrumental value to non-human beings (value of a thing as means to other ends)?  

Heraclitus was a distant precursor of thinking in the natural world with his famous dictum -that you cannot step twice into the same river twice- points to the temporal nature of all things. Plato in his dialogue Critias was one among the earliest philosophers to be aware of soil erosion deforestation, but he was untroubled by these developments as was his disciple Aristotle, who, in his Meteorologica, depicted nature as permanent and fundamentally unchanging and in his Politics, maintains that ‘nature has made all things especially for the sake of man and value of non-human beings is merely instrumental.’  Immanuel Kant, in his Lectures on Ethics, suggests that cruelty towards non -human animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically wrong. He added intrinsic value only to the rational world. George Perkins Marsh, in Man and Nature (1864) considered nature as significantly vulnerable to human activity and at the same time human life as vulnerable to nature and its changes.  All these over anthropocentric activities and giving intrinsic values only to human beings are thrown away by the 20^th centuries’ emergence of environmental philosophy and ecological consciousness.

Widely recognized father of environmental ethics Aldo Leopold’s A Sand Country Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) were earlier disclosures of the challenges of the environment and they demanded an ethics for the ecosystems too. In the 1970s, the philosophers comprehended the necessity of giving intrinsic value to non-human beings but at the same time, anthropocentricity advocated enlightened anthropocentrism or prudential anthropocentrism which viewed that the moral duties we the humans have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants and cynical anthropocentrism which underlined the fact that we the humans have higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Lyn White (1967), in his Essay on the Historical Roots of the Environmental Crisis, emphasized the reason for the overexploitation of nature as the Judeo-Christian thinking of Genesis 1,27-28 (the concept of domination and subduing) and he called it as the orthodox Christian arrogance towards nature. In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich in the book The Population Bomb warned the population explosion as a threat to the viability of life support systems. Garret Hardin in his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” stated that the biggest issue of today is the fact that every individual considers himself to be free in taking as much as he can benefit from the commons (eg. air, water, etc.) and lead to the negative over-exploitation towards commons itself. In 1972, Dennis Meadows published Limits to Growth study and called for the basic changes of values in connection with the environment and it paved way for the development of environmental ethics as the subdivision of philosophy and became a part of the applied philosophy (philosophy applicable to practical issues) which began with the thinking of the political philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Lock, and Kant. At the same time, Christopher Stone emphasized the necessity of considering other species and natural objects as legal persons same as human beings.   Being influenced by the Land ethic of Leopold ( land as whole including species, communities, and ecosystems are to be considered, not just their individual constituents) and responding to the John Passmore’s Man’s Responsibility towards nature (human being as stewards or trustees of nature and responsible for its care; Role of the human being to bring out its potentials), Richard Routley (1973)came up with the ‘last person arguments’ (different from Nietzsche’s view, Richard Sylvan too use devised form of it) to show anthropocentrism as human chauvinism. Later Holmes Rolston(1975) argued for the necessity of moral duty and intrinsic value towards the other species too.

 During this time, many philosophies giving importance to biocentrism also developed. Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology (1973) is the most famous among them which endorsed biospheric egalitarianism with the view that all living things are alike in having a value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others, rejected the atomistic individualism, focused on the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature(ecological ego) and called ecological realization as the human self-realization by proposing the view that respecting and caring for myself as the respect and care to the natural environment. Another eco-friendly philosopher, Peter Singer, in his Animal Liberation proposed the concept of Speciesism, a concept same as sexism, racism, etc. This involves treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species in the context of their similar interests.  According to Singer, for humans, only humans are important, and the rest of all species are mere means. Feministic approaches to the environment also developed during this time.  Even though ecofeminism was coined by Francoise d’ Eaubonne, Eco feministic approaches were popularized by the Feminist philosophers like Sheila Collins, Ynestra King, Vandana Shiva, Val Pumwood and they argued for the importance of having a feminist approach to the environment by considering the earth as mother and by avoiding dualism and patriarchal dominations. Max Horkheimer and Theodore developed disenchantment and new animism in environmental philosophy by proposing sensuous immediacy towards nature. According to them, disenchanted nature is no longer alive and it commands no respect, reverence, or love but a giant machine to be mastered to serve human purposes and for the new animism, living nature comprises not only humans, animals, and plants but also mountains, forests, rivers, and even plants and they try to re-enchant and help to nature by considering ourselves as a mere part of the common flesh of the world.  At the same time, Murray Bookchin developed a social ecology with nature rendered consciousness for nature preservation instead of exploitation of nature with our intelligence. In addition to Murray’s view, Lewis Mumford developed bioregionalism to adapt to local and secure lifestyles by knowing the ecological limits and worth of the region. Pope Francis through his encyclical Laudato Si advocated the importance of integral ecology to create harmony with the nature and necessity of the care of our home by seeing it as our brother, educating us with the cultural ecology, treating it with wonder by seeing ourselves as the protector than the exploiter of it for the sustainability. Anthropocentric and biocentric approaches are still in their fights.

If we stress more on biocentrism, certain questions also may emerge in the real world. In the praxis, the equal value for human and non-human beings would require humans to do nothing that harms other beings. Is it possible for human beings to exist and survive without a certain level of killing, exploitation, and suppression? To what extent we should keep human beings and non-human beings in equal value? In reality, in the sense of humanism, we cannot reject the fact that humans have certain possession of abilities and rationality over non-human beings. Humans cannot reject the humanism of anthropocentrism. We humans should not take it as a privilege but we should see it as a responsibility that humans beings ought to have towards nature. What we need to make is a harmony of collective and individual responsibility towards nature. Instead of extreme biocentrism let us hold a realistic biocentrism with the acceptance of the fact that humans cannot exist without the support of nature and nature cannot keep its greatness as it is without the responsible approaches of humans. Let us hold the fact that we are merely the part of the common home -nature and not the whole.  If humans walk with nature humans will receive far more than they seek. Let us restructure and redefine humanity’s relationship with nature and other creatures with sustainable development in the mind and see nature with a holistic view. Therefore, let us reinterpret our views with our responsibility towards nature and rewild and keep the originality of nature.

 

Shebin Joseph Cheeramvelil