Environmental Ethics: A Tale of Two Books - A Critique of Anthropocentric Environmentalism

Friday, August 28, 2020

A Tale of Two Books - A Critique of Anthropocentric Environmentalism

Going through this weeks reading, I was struck Rolston's argument that environmentalism preservation had an intrinsic value. Most of the circles I run in tend to view environmentalism through the lens of stewardship (a moderate anthropocentric view). While I don't have a hard firm understanding on the boundaries of moral standing in regards to ecosystems and wildlife, I do believe that maintaining the world around us is intrinsically valuable. To argue that we (as humans) ought to preserve nature to simply milk more resources from nature seems (to me) to be remarkably arrogant and self-centered.

The best way I can illustrate why I find the anthropocentric view distasteful on a personal level is best illustrated by comparing two of my favorite books from my childhood: Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen and My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. In Hatchet, the protagonist is an airplane that crashes into the Canadian wilderness. He has to survive until rescue arrives. Comparatively, in My Side of the Mountain, the protagonist runs away from the city to live in the Catskill mountains on New York. Both books discuss and explore the beauty of nature, but through different lenses. Hatchet is a story of man overcoming nature, while Mountain is a story of man living in harmony with nature. Both characters recognize that nature is harsh, but in Hatchet, nature is a puzzle to beat like a level in a Bear Grylls video game, while in Mountain, nature is seen as beautiful and worth enjoying as-is despite the difficulties.

A anthropocentric approach to environmentalism feels very much like the protagonist's approach to nature in Hatchet. Nature and man have a rivalry-like relationship--butting heads in a mutually beneficial fashion. However, the character in Hatchet is seeking to escape the wild and return to the comfort of civilization. There is this underlying assumption throughout the book that civilization is better than the wild beauty of nature. The protagonist simply sees nature as means to an end, that is, means to leave the wilderness behind.

Therein lies my issue with this mindset: this world is our home. There is no escaping earth (space colonies aside). I'm not whitewashing life here on earth; there are environmental disasters we must address as well as natural calamities that wreck havoc. In My Side of the Mountain, the protagonist must learn how to cope with the harsh realities of foraging and northern winters, but he does so by joining the circle of life--not beating it.

“See that falcon? Hear those white-throated sparrows? Smell that skunk? Well, the falcon takes the sky, the white-throated sparrow takes the low bushes, the skunk takes the earth...I take the woods.”

-Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

P.S. I know it seems like I am highly critical of Hatchet, but the book is a Newberry Honor winning book, and I highly recommend both Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, they were both childhood favorites of mine.

By Gary Paulsen Hatchet (0002-) [Hardcover]: Amazon.com: Books My Side of the Mountain (Mountain, #1) by Jean Craighead George

This Week's activity:

- Wrote essay

- Commented on Ed's post

- Added additional DQ's

2 comments:

PhilAugust 29, 2020 at 5:32 PM
It's good, Levi, that with these two stories you frame the tension between Deep Ecology's feeling of identity with and relatedness to nature AND our inevitable struggle to coexist in a world that is fundamentally indifferent (but not personally hostile) to our fate. Nature doesn't TRY to kill us, nor does "she" try not to. It's never personal, except from our end. But connecting and identifying with "the only home we've ever known" is surely one of the conditions of our survival. We know nature can carry on without us, but not we without her.
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Kathryn McCanlessSeptember 3, 2020 at 2:11 PM
I think you accurately described the themes of these book, and I'm left wondering if the authors intentionally worked around these themes of man vs. nature or otherwise. You mentioned the author of one of the books naming a character Thoreau, so I imagine there was conscious effort regarding humanity's interaction with nature in that book. However, for the other ('Hatchet', I believe?), I can imagine the author was merely trying to tell an exciting story. This makes me want to go back and analyze all the media I consumed as a child to try and glean what insights I gained from them. Did Pokemon inspire me to be one with nature? It's entirely possible..
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Friday, August 28, 2020

A Tale of Two Books - A Critique of Anthropocentric Environmentalism

2 comments:

Peripatetics