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Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity

University of California Press

Most people know about radical ecology from headlines featuring Greenpeace members risking life and limb to confront polluters and whalers; from stories about the women of Greenham Common spending years in a vigil next to a British air base to protest nuclear weapons; or from reports of Earth Firstlers resisting attempts to log old-growth forests in the Northwest. This book, although acknowledging the importance of such groups, concerns itself with the less publicized work of radical ecological theorists who represent three major branches of radical ecology: deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. To be sure, in addition to writing essays, these theorists also take other political steps to protest and to alter ecologically destructive practices. In what follows, however, I focus on analyzing, comparing, and evaluating their attempts to provide philosophical frameworks to justify and guide such activism. Although initially attracted to deep ecology, I have learned much from social ecology and ecofeminism. Hence, my intention is to offer an equitable reading of all three branches of radical ecology, though I acknowledge that my reading will inevitably be colored by my own perspectives. Let me begin by briefly sketching some of the basic concerns of each.

Deep ecology explains the ecological crisis as the outcome of the

anthropocentric humanism that is central to the leading ideologies of modernity, including liberal capitalism and Marxism. Hoping to free humankind from material deprivation by controlling nature, modern societies tend to overlook the fact that humans, too, are part of nature. Hence, attempts to gain control of nature have also led to attempts to control human behavior in ways that limit freedom and prevent "self-realization." In general, deep ecologists call for a shift away from anthropocentric humanism toward an ecocentrism guided by the norm of self-realization for all beings.

Social ecology explains the ecological crisis as the outcome not of a generalized anthropocentrism, but rather as the result of authoritarian social structures, embodied most perniciously in capitalism but also present in state socialism. Wanton destruction of nature reflects the distorted social relations at work in hierarchical systems, in which elites subjugate other people while pillaging the natural world for prestige, profit, and control. Maintaining that humans are nature rendered self-conscious, social ecologists call for small-scale, egalitarian, anarchistic societies, which recognize that human well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of the natural world on which human life depends.

Finally, ecofeminists often explain the ecological crisis as the outcome of the patriarchy that follows the "logic of domination." According to this logic, whatever is defined as superior to something else is entitled to use the "inferior" thing in any manner the superior so chooses. Under patriarchy, maleness, rationality, spirit, and culture have been regarded as superior, whereas femaleness, emotion, body, and nature have been regarded as inferior. Members of the allegedly "superior" gender, males, have traditionally felt justified not only in subjugating women, but also in abusing nature. The logic of domination also works by forcing the "other" to conform to the categories that define the masculine, patriarchal subject. Wild nature, then, like "headstrong" women, must be tamed, ordered, and otherwise rendered pliant to masculine will. According to ecofeminists, only dismantling patriarchy will free human relations and nature alike from the dark consequences of the logic of domination.

Despite a number of internal disputes, all radical ecologists attempt to distinguish themselves from "reform environmentalists," who seek to curb industrial pollution and to use natural resources more wisely, but who do not call for basic alterations in modernity's instrumentalist view of nature. Radical ecologists insist, however, that unless far-reaching changes do occur in this and related views, as well as in authoritarian political and socioeconomic arrangements associated with them, modernity's attempt to gain wealth and security through technological control over nature could trigger off ecological catastrophes capable of destroying humankind and much of the rest of terrestrial life. Rejected twenty years ago by mainstream society, some of the claims of radical ecologists are being examined more carefully by a number of contemporary economists, scientists, and politicians, who concede that ecological problems cannot be solved simply by tinkering with the attitudes and practices that generated those problems.

The task of analyzing, comparing, and evaluating these three types of radical ecology has proved to be more complex than I thought it would several years ago, when I first envisioned writing a book on this topic. Let me explain by referring to my own personal and intellectual path to one branch of radical ecology, deep ecology. Like many students during the 1960s, I vilified industrialism and other aspects of the modernity that I held responsible both for ecological violence, and for personal alienation and social disintegration. At the same time that I admired the apparently simpler and more satisfying life of premodern peoples, however, I internalized many of modernity's emancipatory goals, a fact that led me to support the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The counterculture of this period reflected my own ambiguous attitude toward modernity. On the one hand, counterculturalists condemned the dark consequences of modernity, including urban alienation, a control-obsessed technological culture, widespread social violence, and ecological destruction. On the other hand, counterculturalists often used their own version of modernity's rhetoric of freedom, emancipation, and self-determination. Hence, despite their "back to nature" tendencies,

exemplified by experiments with countryside communes, and despite their critique of many features of modernity, many counterculturalists understood themselves far less as politically conservative than as progressive, in the sense that they envisioned the advent of a "new age," characterized by dramatic improvements in personal, political, ecological, and spiritual conditions. Counterculturalists, however, believed that this new era could not arise in the context of modernity's dualistic, control-oriented, hyperrational outlook, but instead would require insights and practices drawn from premodern tribal peoples, from the world's wisdom traditions, from contemporary visionaries attuned to the complex relations between humankind and nature, and from the best of modernity's democratic traditions. The radical ecological movement, in which I began taking part in the 1970s, is an offshoot of the counterculture; hence, radical ecologists criticize some aspects of modernity, while appropriating and transforming other elements of its emancipatory vision.

It was during the time that I was adopting the counterculture's ambiguous attitude toward modernity that I encountered the writings of Martin Heidegger. Attracted to his critique of technological modernity's diminishment of humankind and destruction of nature, I was also drawn to his idea of a "new beginning" that would...