The Challenge of a World Environmental Ethic

by J. Baird Callicott

An environmental ethic that takes into account the impact of human actions directly upon non­human natural entities and nature as a whole is called an ecocentric environmental ethic. An ecocentric environmental ethic is supported by the evolutionary, ecological, foundational, and cosmological dimensions of the presently evolving postmodern, scientific world view.

Among human beings and other social mammals, the moral sentiments evolved to enable the formation of communities. From an evolutionary point of view, Homo sapiens is part of nature, not set apart from it. We are literally kin to all other forms of life. With them we share the Earth, which we now know to be a small and precious planet, like a tropical island paradise in an otherwise desert ocean. Further, ecology presently portrays nature as a congeries of societies or biotic communities. From the subatomic to the biological realms, all reality is interconnected, internally related, and mutually defining. But relationship, kinship, and community membership traditionally imply strong moral obligations. Aldo Leopold rested his seminal and now classic land ethic upon these new postmodern, scientific foundations.

Most indigenous and traditional environmental ethics also fit the ecocentric mold. Indeed, Western philosophers looked initially to traditional Eastern wisdom in their search, begun in earnest in the late 1960s, for an environmental ethic located in a deeply ecological consciousness. And in fact, Eastern philosophy has historically shaped the gradually emerging environmental consciousness in the West. The American Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau ­­ who were among the first American thinkers to look upon nature as something more than an obstacle to progress and a pool of natural resources -was inspired by Hindu thought. Further, distinguished Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was inspired by the Vedantic doctrine of non­duality to make cultivation of the experience of oneness with nature the core practice of his ecocentric environmental ethic, now known as Deep Ecology.

In the mid­twentieth century the emerging contemporary environmental movement was profoundly influenced by Japanese Zen Buddhism. Zen had been powerfully and persuasively represented in the West by D.T. Suzuki in the early twentieth century. Alan Watts popularized Suzuki's somewhat more academic representation. The American nature poet,

Gary Snyder, inspired by Watts, studied Zen Buddhism in Kyoto. In his eventual work a raw and uncultivated American love of and sensitivity to nature was integrated with the very advanced natural aesthetic cultivated for centuries in Japan. Gary Snyder was a charter member of the mid­century American counter­culture that called itself the Beat Generation ­­ romanticized by the enormously popular novelist, Jack Kerouac, in the book Dharma Bums. Thus, when Americans awakened to the environmental crisis in the late 1960s, they turned for philosophical guidance to the cultural alternatives then popular, and Zen Buddhism was by far the most in evidence. Since then, the attention of Western environmental philosophers has gravitated more to Taoism. The concept of living in accordance with the tao of nature complements the evolutionary and ecological axiom that human beings are part of nature and must conform human ways of living to natural processes and cycles. Especially in the Taoist concept of wu wed, Western environmental ethicists have found a traditional Eastern analogue of what they call appropriate technologies-technologies that blend with and harness natural forces as opposed to technologies that resist and attempt to dominate and reorganize nature.

With the current and more ominous second wave of the twentieth century's environmental crisis now upon us, environmental philosophy must strive to facilitate the emergence of a global environmental consciousness that spans national and cultural boundaries. In part, this requires a more sophisticated crosscultural comparison of traditional and contemporary concepts of the relationship between people and nature than has so far characterized the discussion. I am convinced that the intellectual foundations of the industrial epoch in world history are an aberration: a new paradigm is emerging that will sooner or later replace the obsolete mechanical world view and its associated values and technological esprit.

The emerging twenty­first century paradigm has many conceptual affinities with pre­industrial natural attitudes and values, especially those of the East. Thus, detailed, cross­cultural comparison of traditional concepts of the relationship between people and nature with the ideas emerging in ecology and the new physics should be mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, traditional environmental ethics can be thus revived, and just as importantly validated or verified by the affinity of their foundational ideas with the most exciting new ideas in contemporary science. On the other hand, the otherwise abstract and arcane concepts of nature, human nature, and the relationship between people and nature implied in ecology and the new physics can be expressed aand articulated in the rich vocabulary of metaphor, simile, and analogy developed in the traditional sacred and philosophical literature of the world's many and diverse cultures.

What I envision for the twenty­first century is a single, univocal, international environmental ethic based on ecology and the new physics and expressed in the cognitive lingua franca of contemporary science. Complementing such an international, scientifically grounded and expressed environmental ethic ­­ global in scope as well as focus ­­ I also envision the revival of a multiplicity of traditional, cultural environmental ethics that resonate with it and that help to articulate it. Thus we may have one world view and one associated environmental ethic corresponding to the contemporary reality that we inhabit one planet and that we are one species, and that our deepening environmental crisis is common and global. And we may also have a plurality of revived and renewed traditional world views and associated environmental ethics corresponding to the historical reality that we are many people inhabiting many diverse bioregions apprehended through many and diverse cultural lenses. But this one and these many are not at odds. Each of the many world views and associated ethics may crystallize the international ecological environmental ethic in the vernacular of a particular and local cultural tradition. Let us by all means think globally and act locally. But let us also think locally as well as globally and try to tune our global and local thinking as the several notes of a single and common chord.